R G Dewar

Assembly planning in a virtual environment

This paper presents novel tools to assist manual assembly in an virtual environment. While assembling virtual components, the users actions are logged and an assembly plan is produced. Prototyping is reduced and concurrency is enhanced using such tools. Successful pilot studies have now been completed.

Designing cable harness assemblies in virtual environments

Abstract Cable harness assemblies are amongst the most costly items in any electro-mechanical product. The domain is not widely recognised as an area for academic research. Internationally, some efforts have been made to automate or semi-automate the choice of cable harness path through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) via CAD systems, but with little success. Common themes voiced are that the problem is too open-ended and it is very difficult to capture the design intent of the activity. Human input is still very much required to guide the computer systems to reach an ‘optimum’ solution. Case study investigations were carried out at five advanced manufacturing organisations to determine the current industrial practice. The investigations revealed that the cable harness design and planning (CHDP) process is essentially sequential in nature and consists of lengthy activities carried out late in the overall product development cycle. It was also found that there has been little attempt to integrate any of the core activities involved. This paper describes work undertaken at Heriot-Watt University to research the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality for designing and routing cable harnesses by enhancing the expertise of the cable harness designer rather than by replacing the individual via an automated system. The new virtual cable design system developed in the course of this work has now undergone some pilot trials to test its usability. The system will subsequently be used to carry out full industrial trials in conjunction with a number of high technology equipment manufacturers. These pilot trials, combined with the case studies of current practice carried out at the companies, have highlighted a number of issues regarding cable design, particularly that immersive VR has a potentially unique role to play in the integration of cable harness electrical and mechanical design activities.

The role of non-intrusive operator logging to support the analysis and generation of product engineering data using immersive VR

Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to substantially alter the manner in which products of the future are engineered. Currently there are many applications of VR during the product engineering process from design and analysis through to process planning, assembly, machining and shop floor layout. VR takes a multitude of forms, including immersive, desktop, augmented, and is rapidly developing as a tool that can be used in the engineering of products. This paper looks at the use of immersive VR as a tool for analysing both design and manufacturing product engineering activities in a series of research projects involving assembly planning and cable harness design. It focuses particularly on the use of the non-intrusive logging of users in such environments as a means to obtaining a rich data source for activity analysis and its potential within computer integrated manufacturing environments as a means of providing downstream engineering data.

The application of virtual reality to tasks in manufacturing and assembly engineering

Virtual Reality is a developing technology for which a range of applications are heing explored by different international research groups. This paper describes recent research in the application of Virtual Reality to two important manufacturing and assembly tasks which have a direct influence on the speed of introduction of new products. The tasks are the production of planning documentation for assembled products and the design and planning of the cable harnesses which form part of all electro-mechanical assemblies. The research completed so far demonstrates the potential of Virtual Reality, even at its current stage of technological development, to make a significant contribution in both these cases.

Context-Aware Personalization in Pervasive Communications

This paper gives a brief overview of the Daidalos Personalization architecture, the aim of which is to improve user experience by personalizing services, including third-party services and Daidalos enabling services in pervasive computing environments. Personalization plays a paramount role in service composition, elucidation of user preferences and reservation of resources for users, where user privacy has been well considered. In this paper, we discuss how personalization is exploited and investigated to give a completely personalized service offering to a user at any time, any where

ANALYSIS OF USER ACTIVITY IN AN ENGINEERING DESIGN TASK DURING THE EVALUATION OF AN IMMERSIVE STEREOSCOPIC DESIGN SYSTEM

This paper describes the analysis of user activity during the evaluation of Co-Star, a demonstration immersive stereoscopic design system for cable harness design. During the study ten participants independently completed a sequence of three harness design tasks using the test system. All user interaction was recorded during each of the sessions and subsequently analysed to profile the distribution of user activity into five major activity classes: Design, System Operation, Navigation and Information, and Process Integration. The Design class was further sub-divided into Goal, Support, and Edit activities to produce a more detailed breakdown of this core activity. In addition measures of ‘unproductive activity’ and ‘sequence breaks’ (idle time) were used to identify relative performance within the different activities. The results clearly show the distribution of user activity for this task based on time and number of sequences of user activity and provide a compelling visualisation of this profile, with Navigation typically accounting for 41% and System Operation 23% of user activity whilst Design achieved 27%, in addition it was found that 7% of all activity was found to be unproductive, and 28% of system time was idle. Opportunities to improve operational design performance through targeted system developments can be clearly identified from these results.Copyright

Learning from Patterns During Information Technology Configuration

This paper asks how people can be assisted in learning from practice, as a basis for informing future action, when configuring information technology (IT) in organizations. It discusses the use of Alexanderian Patterns as a means of aiding such learning. Three patterns are presented that have been derived from a longitudinal empirical study that has focused on practices surrounding IT configuration. The paper goes on to argue that Alexanderian Patterns offer a valuable means of learning from past experience. It is argued that learning from experience is an important dimension of deciding “what needs to be done” in configuring IT with organizational context. The three patterns outlined are described in some detail, and the implications of each discussed. Although it is argued that patterns, per se, provide a valuable tool for learning from experience, some potential dangers in seeking to codify experience with a patterns approach are also discussed.

Effects of Natural Language Complexity on Student Performance in Object-Oriented Domain Analysis

This chapter examines whether there is more to teaching students how to identify object-oriented (OO) concepts in domain analysis than has perhaps previously been appreciated. Understanding domain descriptions, expressed in natural language, in the early stages of software development is crucial to the success of a project. A study is presented which measured the performance of senior undergraduate computing students in terms of the types of errors they make as they tried to understand and identify important domain concepts. It concludes that the form of natural language used has an influence on the accuracy of a persons interpretation. In particular, students have a tendency to be confused by complex sentences and domain irrelevant information. In addition, students fail to notice important concepts indicated by infrequently appearing words.

Two executable mobility design patterns: mfold and mmap

We present two mobility design patterns, mfold and mmap. The patterns are equipped with corresponding coordination specifications, mobility skeletons, implemented on top of a host object-orientated mobile code language, Voyager. The mobility skeletons provide a high-level of abstraction and control all coordination aspects of the mobility design patterns. We conclude by demonstrating, through a simple yet concrete example, how the composite of these patterns and skeletons can be used in the development of a practical distributed application, a mobile meeting scheduler.

Mental Models as Enablers of Knowledge Sharing and Decision-Making in the Design Ofcollaborative Networked Environments

This article draws initial conclusions from multiple cases of knowledge sharing in the collaborative design of networked systems. The studies look at the different ways in which different project teams have created and/or used shared mental models to facilitate the collective representation, configuration or re-use of knowledge. It draws analogies with other ‘interface languages’ for knowledge representation and across social, technical and organizational domains. It has implications for the role of shared mental models in knowledge sharing and decision support in the design of networked systems, where these require trade-offs between technical constraints on the one hand, and the social, organisational and professional requirements of stake-holding communities on the other.