Markus Aleksy

Aletheia--Improving Industrial Service Lifecycle Management by Semantic Data Federations

It is expected that the amount of product information available from the Internet of Things and Services will be so tremendous, that the main challenge will be to provide the right information, at the right time, in the right place, and to the right people. This objective is addressed by Aletheia - a distributed information system that enables the federation and semantic integration of very heterogeneous information sources. This paper discusses the goals, functionality, and architecture of Aletheia, guided by a real-world case study in the industrial service sector and conducted in cooperation with ABB, a major company providing power and automation technologies, products, and services for utility and industry customers.

Wearable Computing in Industrial Service Applications

Wearable computing promises to gain efficiency improvements in industrial applications due to augmentation of the device as well as improved interaction between the user and the device. In this paper, we present the results of a study with focus on utilization of wearable computing in industrial service applications. Our study consisted of a preliminary market scan with regard to wearable computing devices and literature analysis that has been conducted to find out where wearable computing is already used or is well suited for industrial service applications.

Assessing software product line potential: an exploratory industrial case study

Corporate organizations sometimes offer similar software products in certain domains due to former company mergers or due to the complexity of the organization. The functional overlap of such products is an opportunity for future systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. Therefore, we have tailored existing domain analysis methods to our organization to identify commonalities and variabilities among such products and to assess the potential for software product line (SPL) approaches. As an exploratory case study, we report on our experiences and lessons learned from conducting the domain analysis in four application cases with large-scale software products. We learned that the outcome of a domain analysis was often a smaller integration scenario instead of an SPL and that business case calculations were less relevant for the stakeholders and managers from the business units during this phase. We also learned that architecture reconstruction using a simple block diagram notation aids domain analysis and that large parts of our approach were reusable across application cases.

Customizing domain analysis for assessing the reuse potential of industrial software systems: experience report

In companies with a large portfolio of software or software-intensive products, functional overlaps are often perceived between independent products. In such situations it is advisable to systematically analyze the potential of systematic reuse and Software Product Lines. To this end, several domain analysis approaches, e.g., SEI Technical Probe, have been proposed to decide whether a set of products with a perceived functional overlap should be integrated into a single product line. Based on the principles of those approaches we devised our own approach. One important property is the inherent flexibility of the method to be able to apply it to four different application cases in industrial software products at ABB. In this paper we present our refined approach for domain analysis. The results and lessons learned are meant to support industrial researchers and practitioners alike. Moreover, the lessons learned highlight real-world findings concerning software reuse.

Utilizing wearable computing in industrial service applications

Wearable computing promises to gain efficiency improvements in industrial applications due to augmentation of the device as well as improved interaction between the user and the device. In this paper, we present the results of a study with focus on utilization of wearable computing in industrial service applications. Our study consisted of a preliminary market scan with regard to wearable computing devices and literature analysis that has been conducted to find out where wearable computing is already used or is well suited for industrial service applications. Additionally, we carried out a case study at an industrial plant to figure out which of the existing service processes can be improved by wearable and mobile devices and show how it could be done. Finally, we discuss the desired developments that would enable wearable computing to enter the practice of industrial service.

Mobile computing application for industrial field service engineering: A case for ABB service engineers

The increasing digitalization of our daily lives is gaining a new momentum recently in what is called the post-desktop era of computing. This wide spread in digitalization is made possible by the introduction of handy devices specifically of mobile phones, laptop computers, Smartphones, and tablets. This new trend in shaping up technological advancement presents new opportunities for mobile information presentation, processing, and synthesis in different spheres of application such as providing industrial field services engineering support. Industrial field service engineers execute sets of work orders on daily basis plans. These work order executions demand the availability of digital information anywhere anytime to process them faster. This paper presents a scenario where the newly emerging Smartphone features such as augmented reality, audio / video processing, and near field communication sensing can be used to develop a prototype that supports industrial field service engineers in the contemporary field service engineering taskforces. It employs real world use-cases and carrying out quantitative prototype usability test analysis.

Semantic Federation of Product Information from Structured and Unstructured Sources

Product-related information can be found in various data sources and formats across the product lifecycle. Effectively exploiting this information requires the federation of these sources, the extraction of implicit information, and the efficient access to this comprehensive knowledge base. Existing solutions for product information management PIM are usually restricted to structured information, but most of the business-critical information resides in unstructured documents. We present a generic architecture for federating heterogeneous information from various sources, including the Internet of Things, and argue how this process benefits from using semantic representations. A reference implementation tailor-made to business users is explained and evaluated. We also discuss several issues we experienced that we believe to be valuable for researchers and implementers of semantic information systems, as well as the information retrieval community.

The role of knowledge management technologies in service business processes

Instant availability of up-to-date information is a vital pre-requisite in todays business for decision making and the execution of many job tasks. Especially, in service business, which is to a high degree human-based and knowledge-driven, service job experience and information about the customer as well as the installed equipment are critical success factors to deliver high quality services efficiently. Very often this information is stored in heterogeneous back-end systems and it needs to be aggregated and retrieved on demand. It needs to be provided to customer contact centers, which deal with the first customer contacts, as well as to field service engineers, who need to be well-prepared for the service job execution. In this paper, a case study is used to describe how knowledge management technologies can facilitate these service processes based on a process analysis- and knowledge requirement- driven approach.

Developing portable FPGA applications - A literature review

Industrial applications from areas like automation, process control, or power controls have a very long-life time up-to 30 years or even more. Supporting applications developed for such life-times cannot rely on the availability of the hardware the application was originally developed on. Especially FPGA families are updated approximately every 12-18th months. This presents a major challenge if functionality in such long-living applications has to be realized on FPGAs (e.g. for performance reasons): How to avoid considerable re-development efforts when replacing obsolete hardware? Concepts for developing portable FPGA applications that can be easily migrated to new hardware are of crucial importance to answer this challenge. In this paper we review and evaluate different approaches for developing portable FPGA applications.

Context-sensitive and semantic-based mobile applications in industrial field service

Presents a collection of slides covering the following topics: resource management; context-aware user interfaces; service discovery; process support; alternative input-output capabilities; Aletheia; and mobile service business patterns.