Manik Madhikermi

QLM messaging standards: introduction and comparison with existing messaging protocols

Recent advancement in web technology enabled the development of new Business-to-Business (B2B) infrastructures, e.g. based on the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These infrastructures enable seamless information exchange among different stakeholders and complex business procedures. However, there is still a lack of sufficiently generic and standardized application-level interfaces for exchanging the kind of information required by such infrastructures. These interfaces must be as complete and flexible as possible to support changing organization needs and structures. Their development is an essential step to design future SOA services and to enhance product lifecycle management. The Quantum Lifecycle Management (QLM) messaging standards are proposed as a standard application-level interface that would fulfil such requirements. This standard is introduced in this paper and compared to existing ones. Several real-life implementations are presented to show why such messaging standards are needed and how flexible QLM messaging standards are.

Data quality assessment of maintenance reporting procedures

Evidence that data quality is hardly considered in expert & intelligent systems is provided.A decision-support tool for maintenance data reporting assessment is developed.A company uses the proposed tool to rank branch offices in terms of reporting quality.Enhanced reporting quality results in enhanced business activities & decision-making. Todays largest and fastest growing companies assets are no longer physical, but rather digital (software, algorithms...). This is all the more true in the manufacturing, and particularly in the maintenance sector where quality of enterprise maintenance services are closely linked to the quality of maintenance data reporting procedures. If quality of the reported data is too low, it can results in wrong decision-making and loss of money. Furthermore, various maintenance experts are involved and directly concerned about the quality of enterprises daily maintenance data reporting (e.g., maintenance planners, plant managers...), each one having specific needs and responsibilities. To address this Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem, and since data quality is hardly considered in existing expert maintenance systems, this paper develops a maintenance reporting quality assessment (MRQA) dashboard that enables any company stakeholder to easily - and in real-time - assess/rank company branch offices in terms of maintenance reporting quality. From a theoretical standpoint, AHP is used to integrate various data quality dimensions as well as expert preferences. A use case describes how the proposed MRQA dashboard is being used by a Finnish multinational equipment manufacturer to assess and enhance reporting practices in a specific or a group of branch offices.

Towards data exchange interoperability in building lifecycle management

Building Information Management systems have started to leverage new kinds of digital information infrastructures that integrate activities related to design, budgeting, scheduling, analysis, material management, and human resources. Companies implementing such systems have no other option today than exchanging information among themselves in a proper and efficient way. Industry foundation classes (IFCs) provide useful information structures for such a data sharing. However they do not specify how to capture, exchange and synchronize the information between distinct entities (i.e. information systems like sensors, servers, smart products...) throughout the building lifecycle. Accordingly, this paper investigates existing messaging protocols in order to identify which one is the most appropriate for supporting building lifecycle management; i.e a flexible protocol that provides sufficiently generic communication interfaces. A platform set up on a university campus based on the selected messaging protocol is then presented. Within this context, the research agenda that should be pursued to develop new techniques and algorithms for optimizing the building energy management is announced.

Data supply chain in Industrial Internet

The Industrial Internet promises to radically change and improve many industrys daily business activities, from simple data collection and processing to context-driven, intelligent and pro-active support of workers everyday tasks and life. The present paper first provides insight into a typical industrial internet application architecture, then it highlights one fundamental arising contradiction: “Who owns the data is often not capable of analyzing it”. This statement is explained by imaging a visionary data supply chain that would realize some of the Industrial Internet promises. To concretely implement such a system, recent standards published by The Open Group are presented, where we highlight the characteristics that make them suitable for Industrial Internet applications. Finally, we discuss comparable solutions and concludes with new business use cases.

IoT-based interoperability framework for asset and fleet management

Service business renewal to support global fleet operations is one of the critical competitiveness factors of technology industries. This paper describes preliminary results of defining an IoT-based framework for fleet management systems (FMS). The main contribution is to provide a systematic outline to the ingredients of the framework and discussing their impact in an industrial setting. The overall aim of the research is to define a technical framework for fleet management solutions and to define the necessary set of functionalities that the framework should support as a base for FMS systems. The framework will be implemented and validated in collaboration with industrial partners.

Data Quality Assessment of Companyźs Maintenance Reporting: A Case Study

Businesses are increasingly using their enterprise data for strategic decision-making activities. In fact, information, derived from data, has become one of the most important tools for businesses to gain competitive edge. Data quality assessment has become a hot topic in numerous sectors and considerable research has been carried out in this respect, although most of the existing frameworks often need to be adapted with respect to the use case needs and features. Within this context, this paper develops a methodology for assessing the quality of enterprises daily maintenance reporting, relying both on an existing data quality framework and on a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique. Our methodology is applied in cooperation with a n nFinnish multinational company in order to evaluate and rank different company sites/office branches (carrying out maintenance activities) according to the quality of their data reporting. Based on this evaluation, the industrial partner wants to establish new action plans for enhanced reporting practices.

Heat recovery unit failure detection in air handling unit

Maintenance is a complicated task that encompasses various activities including fault detection, fault diagnosis, and fault reparation. The advancement of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has increased challenges in maintenance as modern assets have became complex mixes of systems and sub systems with complex interaction. Among maintenance activities, fault diagnosis is particularly cumbersome as the reason of failures on the system is often neither obvious in terms of their source nor unique. Early detection and diagnosis of such faults is turning to one of the key requirements for economical and functional asset efficiency. Several methods have been investigated to detect machine faults for a number of years that are relevant for many application domains. In this paper, we present the process history-based method adopting nominal efficiency of Air Handling Unit (AHU) to detect heat recovery failure using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) in combination of the logistic regression method.

Authentication and Access Control for Open Messaging Interface Standard

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) vendors is rapidly growing, providing solutions for all levels of the IoT stack. Despite the universal agreement on the need for a standardized technology stack, following the model of the world-wide-web, a large number of industry-driven domain specific standards hinder the development of a single IoT ecosystem. An attempt to solve this challenge is the introduction of O-MI (Open Messaging Interface) and O-DF (Open Data Format), two domain independent standards published by Open Group. Despite their good compatibility, they define no specific security model. This paper takes the first step of defining a security model for these standards by proposing suitable access control and authentication mechanisms that can regulate the rights of different principles and operations defined in these standards. First, a brief introduction is provided of the O-MI and O-DF standards, including a comparison with existing standards. Second, the envisioned security model is presented, together with the implementation details of the plug-in module developed for the O-MI and O-DF reference implementation.

Two-way communications through firewalls using QLM messaging.

Nowadays, organizations make a point of protecting the confidentiality of their data and assets using firewalls, proxies and NATs, which goes against providing a high level of data usability and interoperability between distinct information systems, or “Things” in the so-called Internet of Things. Such security procedures often prevent two-way communications between nodes located on each side of the firewall. Quantum Lifecycle Management (QLM) messaging has been introduced as a messaging standard proposal that would fulfill the requirements for exchanging the kind of information required by an IoT. In this regard, the QLM piggy backing property proposed in that standard makes it possible to achieve two-way communication through a firewall. This property is introduced in this paper, along with the first proofs-of-concept.

Deferred Retrieval of IoT Information Using QLM Messaging Interface

Internet of Things (IoT) is intended to provide a network where information flows could easily be retrieved and set up between any kinds of products, devices, users, etc. Quantum Lifecycle Management messaging interface (QLM-MI) has been designed accordingly, providing generic and standardized application-level interfaces. One cornerstone property of QLM-MI provides the opportunity to subscribe IoT information from any “Thing” so as to retrieve it in a deferred way. Subscriptions can be performed to receive a “continuous” data flow or can be based on “client-initiated” communications. All these features are described in this paper, and then a technical proof-of-concept is provided based on a scenario in the framework of smart home.