Norihisa Komoda

A Petri Net-Based Controller for Flexible and Maintainable Sequence Control and its Applications in Factory Automation

A new type of software system for an industrial sequence controller is proposed. In this system, a control program is described with the Petri net-like language named Control-net (C-net). This language improves control software maintainability and flexibility. An efficient C-net interpretation schema for real-time control is presented and an overhead time evaluation model of the proposed schema is developed. Through the model analysis and measurement of the response time of an interpreter on a microcomputer, it is proved that the interpretation schema satisfies the required response time. Finally, a microcomputer based controller named Station Controller (SCR) in which the presented C-net interpreter was installed is described and several applications of this controller to real systems are illustrated.

Business process integration as a solution to the implementation of supply chain management systems

In the domain of supply chain management (SCM), various software packages have been developed for planning business strategies. To solve the problem of system productivity in applying planning packages, we propose a solution concept, business process integration (BPI), which fuses workflow and enterprise application integration (EAI) technology. Two characteristic policies are included in BPI. The first is to design the minimum set of business processes for real-time information sharing with planning packages without changing other processes. The second is to integrate several systems with EAI technology and to manage their execution with a workflow tool. Based on these policies, we propose various design templates and integration adapters. Our evaluation shows that using BPI, a target system can be developed with less manpower, in less time, and with higher quality than previous methods.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in Industrial Systems

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is attended as a design framework for realizing rapid and low-cost system development, easily modified system, and total system quality. SOA is mainly applied to business information systems using Web services standards and technologies, and is rapidly becoming a standard approach for enterprise IT systems. In industrial systems, SOA has been successfully applied such as SCM, order entry system, etc. However, in the low layer management and control systems, Web services cannot apply because of particular requirement. The specific functions needed to apply the concept of SOA to real-time system (response time, support of event-driven, asynchronous parallel applications, complicated human interface support, reliability, etc.). First of this talk, SOA will be briefly explained. Then, we will point out several issues arisen when the concept of SOA applied to the industrial systems. Finally, example industrial systems (business systems and command and control systems) applied SOA will be introduced.

Evaluating the quantitative effects of workflow systems based on real cases

The effects of introducing a workflow system include improved work efficiency, reduced processing time (that is, turnaround time), standardized business processes, and paperless processing. However, no concrete methodology for quantitatively evaluating these effects has been established. By analyzing some examples of introducing workflow systems, we extracted the factors that influence the effects, and we used quantification theory type I to create a mathematical model for predicting the rate of reduction of processing time as an effect of introducing a workflow system. As a result, we concluded that: (1) the process improvement and (2) business process classification, before the introduction of the workflow system, are the factors that influence the effects. As a predictive model, multiple correlation coefficient R is 0.932, showing that the two factors have a considerable influence.

Multiple type workflow model for enterprise application integration

The business environment is changing rapidly everyday. Enterprise information systems must be able to adapt to changes in markets quickly and flexibly. Enterprises control large amounts of software resources and these software resources must be integrated. One solution that is attracting a great deal of attention is the concept of enterprise application integration (EAI). EAI can adapt to changes in markets quickly and flexibly. As a method for implementing EAI, we are proposing business process-based integration using workflow techniques. Business process-based integration divides an enterprise information system into business processes and the work logic that comprises the system. We propose a new type of workflow for EAI. The new workflow for EAI uses a CORBA interface to integrate different types of systems and uses a state transition model based on a database to dynamically control processes. An organization can define business processes and rules so that the business processes can flexibly adapt to changes in the organization and applications. We have confirmed the effectiveness of this new workflow management system for EAI by applying it in an actual test case.

Dynamic optimization of virtual machine placement by resource usage prediction

In order to save energy with preventing the lack of the resources on servers in data centers, we address the dynamic optimization of virtual machine placement. A decision problem of the virtual machine placement has been formulated as Bin Packing problem. Conventional methods repeat to solve the problem at regular intervals. Live migration is used for changing the virtual machine placement, but some of live migrations are unnecessary; the virtual machine is migrated repeatedly between the physical servers. For the purpose of reducing the unnecessary live migrations, we propose a dynamic optimization of virtual machine placement by resource usage prediction. The proposed method predicts the future resource usage by Auto Regressive Model. The proposed method decides the virtual machine placement by solving the Bin Packing problem with the predicted resource usage.

Stochastic qualitative reasoning and its application to diagnosis of air conditioning system

The simulation technique on qualitative models is one of the powerful tools for the fault diagnosis. However, since a qualitative model is expressed with simple causal relations, enormous number of behaviors are possible even pruning off improbable behaviors by some real measured values patterns. Therefore, it is hard to apply it to practical scale system as it is. To cope with this problem, a stochastic qualitative reasoning is proposed in this paper. In this method, all of the behaviors have existence probabilities. The behaviors with relatively small probability are eliminated. We have applied this method to diagnosis of the air conditioning system. If a trouble is reported, the qualitative models of the target system in normal and failure are simulated and compared with the real measured values in the target plant. Agreement degrees with the model and the measured values are calculated with existence probabilities, and the cause of failure is found out. Through this application, we have confirmed the effectiveness of the method.<<ETX>>

Proposal and Evaluation of Policy Description for Information Lifecycle Management

Information lifecycle management (ILM) is attracting more attention as the costs of data retention and security and of regulatory compliance requirements are being increased by the explosive growth of information being handled and by increasingly stringent government regulations. The goal of ILM is to ensure that information is stored on the most appropriate medium providing the service level required at the phase of the informations lifecycle. This paper describes a method for describing and interpreting ILM policies in a way that information managers find easy to understand and that can be used to automate the ILM process

Protein structure classification by structural transformation

Protein structure classification plays an important role in understanding the relationships among structure and sequence. Recently, as the number of known protein structure are increasing steeply, automatic classification is highly required. This paper presents a new method of classification of protein folds based on the structural similarities between a pair of proteins from the viewpoint of the secondary structural elements. The similarity can be evaluated through the structural transformation from one protein to the other, which is composed of a set of predefined primitive operations. Since the similarity is scored with the total cost of the transformation, the method requires no threshold value. The effectiveness of the method was empirically demonstrated through the experiments using the data in the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank.

Scenario generator for qualitative simulation system

A qualitative simulation system has been developed for understanding the behavior of a system modeled by a structural model. In decision making, it is necessary to understand the influence flow, namely how the model derives the behavior of the concerning node in the model rather than the behavior of each node. This paper presents a mechanism of scenario generating for explaining the influence flow to the concerning node. The mechanism consists of the following processes: 1) by tracing the structural model, all paths from the input node, which triggers the initial change of the system, to the concerning node are derived, and using similarity of behavior, the influence flow to the concerning node is selected out of all paths; 2) important nodes are selected according to the type of nodes; and 3) the scenario document is generated along the selected flow using the sentence template and the word dictionary.