With the development of technology and manufacturing, the conflicts between environment protection, economic interest and social benefit have been awared and paid more attention to in recent years. ...The sustainability performance has been considered by increasing number of decision makers. In the real-life practice, it will strongly affect the prioritization results if the criteria considered in the sustainability assessment are interdependent. Therefore, a non-orthogonal coordinate system based multi-criteria decision making method which can incorporate the interactions and interdependences among the criteria for sustainability assessment is proposed in this study. An illustrative case about electricity production was used to illustrate the developed sustainability prioritization model. The results obtained by the proposed method are compared with that based on the traditional method, and sensitivity analysis is also carried out. The results reveal that it is prerequisite to incorporate the interactions and interdependences between sustainability-oriented decision-maker, and the developed non-orthogonal coordinates based sustainability assessment framework is feasible for the prioritization of industrial systems with the considerations of the interactions and interdependences among the evaluation criteria.
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•A decision making framework was developed to assess sustainability of industrial systems•The interdependences among criteria were incorporated in the decision-making framework•TOPSIS was extended to the non-orthogonal coordinate system•This is a sustainability-oriented expert system for smart decision-making.
The direct combustion of recyclable metals has the potential to become a zero-carbon energy production alternative, much needed to alleviate the effects of global climate change caused by the ...increased emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2. In this work, we show that the emission of CO2 is insignificant during the combustion of pulverized sponge iron compared to that of pulverized coal combustion. The emissions of the other harmful pollutants NO x and SO2 were 25 and over 30 times lower, respectively, than in the case of pulverized coal combustion. Furthermore, 96 wt % of the solid combustion products consisted of micrometer-sized, solid or hollow hematite (α-Fe2O3) spheres. The remaining 4 wt % of products was maghemite (γ-Fe2O3) nanoparticles. According to thermodynamic calculations, this product composition implies near-complete combustion, with a conversion above 98%. The results presented in this work strongly suggest that sponge iron is a clean energy carrier and may become a substitute to pulverized coal as a fuel in existing or newly designed industrial systems.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to many disruptions in industrial value chains, the adoption of circular economy (CE) principles appears to be a commendable solution for more robust, resilient, ...and sustainable industrial supply chains. In this study, the standpoints and visions of two consecutive classes of engineering students – following the course “Circular Economy & Industrial Systems” at the Université Paris-Saclay – are given on how they value CE strategies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on industrial practices. Capturing and understanding the viewpoints of the engineers of tomorrow on such a pressing issue is key to train and provide them with the suitable methods and tools to build a more circular and sustainable society. At the end of their eight-week training class, including theoretical background on industrial ecology tools, workshops, and a hands-on project, part of the final exam included a one-hour essay in which the students had to argue their position on the following questions: (i) “Circular Economy as an answer to the COVID-19 crisis?” for the class of 2020, and (ii) “Circular Economy as an answer for green recovery and value chain resiliency in the COVID-19 context?” for the class of 2021. Interestingly, the evolution of viewpoints between the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis (exam conducted in May 2020 for the first class) and one year after (exam conducted in Mars 2021 for the second class) is discussed and illustrated. Also, the answers and insights provided by engineering students on these questions are positioned within the state-of-the-art literature on the topic. Last but not least, key recommendations and challenges on how CE could alleviate COVID-related disruptions and production shortages are synthesized in a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities) diagram.
•Flow Integrity ensures that all messages are received unaltered and in the correct order.•Flow Integrity is crucial in industrial control systems.•Flow Integrity can be formally verified using ...TAMARIN.•A version of MODBUS suffers from a weakness, as well as OPC-UA if sequence number overflows appear.•The weakness can be reproduced on a real OPC-UA implementation.
Industrial systems are nowadays regularly the target of cyberattacks, the most famous being Stuxnet. At the same time such systems are increasingly interconnected with other systems and insecure media such as Internet. In contrast to other IT systems, industrial systems often do not only require classical properties like data confidentiality or authentication of the communication, but have special needs due to their interaction with physical world. For example, the reordering or deletion of some commands sent to a machine can cause the system to enter an unsafe state with potentially catastrophic effects. To prevent such attacks, the integrity of the message flow is necessary. We provide a formal definition of Flow Integrity. We apply our definitions to two well-known industrial protocols: OPC-UA and MODBUS. Using Tamarin, a cryptographic protocol verification tool, we confirm that most of the secure modes of these protocols ensure Flow Integrity given a resilient network. However, we also identify weaknesses in a supposedly secure version of MODBUS, as well as subtleties in the handling of sequence numbers in OPC-UA. We also practically examine an OPC-UA stack named python-opcua, where some of the subtleties are not handled correctly.
Development of future industry has become an active research area in the recent years. A structured national workgroup, called IMS2, has emerged in France over the last decade. The aim of this paper ...is, regarding four highlighted general research topics (namely agility, new technologies, sustainability, and industrial dissemination), to synthetize the general research works on intelligent manufacturing and to demonstrate the principal contributions developed within the framework of this national workgroup. After a critical evaluation of the proposed approaches toward alternative solutions, this paper suggests a 2030 roadmap for the workgroup.
This paper investigates opportunities to enhance Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) of emerging technologies within innovation systems. We address key challenges faced by policymakers ...developing innovation strategies for emerging technologies. In particular, we explore ways that FTA might be structured to investigate the complex innovation system journeys of novel technologies as they are developed, diffused, and deployed. In doing this, we draw on concepts from technology and operations management and related literatures to more carefully characterise the: (1) ‘technical infrastrucutre’ required to develop emerging technologies; (2) key technology transitions involved in diffusion; and (3) complex industrial value networks into which they may eventually get deployed.
We investigate the extent to which these categories are already used within national technology foresight exercises. In particular, we review over 240 international FTA-related policy, strategy, and analysis documents for ‘advanced materials’. We find that – although generally used inconsistently and unsystematically within FTA – these categories repeatedly emerge as important elements in many policies, strategies, and underpinning foresight exercises. We conclude by arguing that these categories should be carefully considered in initial FTA design. And that, by doing so, FTA exercises may better reveal potential ‘innovation system failures’ and help policymakers coordinate policy actions in response.
•Structure from other literatures can enhance FTA for emerging technologies.•Categories explored: technology types, lifecycle transitions, industrial structure•These categories are real, but receive varied attention in advanced materials FTA.•They help FTA apply innovation system concepts by drawing out system failures.•Point to enabling technology, transition, and industrial absorptive capability gaps.
Multivariate Time Series (MTS) data obtained from large scale systems carry resourceful information about the internal system status. Multivariate Time Series Clustering is one of the exploratory ...methods that can enable one to discover the different types of behavior that is manifested in different working periods of a system. This knowledge can then be used for tasks such as anomaly detection or system maintenance. In this study, we make use of the statistical method, Variable Order Markov Models (VOMMs) to model each individual MTS and employ a new metric to calculate the distances between those VOMMs. The pairwise distances are then used to accomplish the MTS Clustering task. Two other MTS Clustering methods are presented and the superiority of the proposed method is confirmed with the experiments on two data sets from Cyber-Physical Systems. The computational complexity of the presented methods is also discussed.
Many industrial systems have specific requirements derived from the applications they execute. Specifically, the interaction of a distributed embedded control system (DECS) with the real-world ...imposes strict real-time (RT) and reliability requirements. For a system to be RT, it has to produce a proper result in a bounded time. On top of that, for a system to be reliable, it has to operate continuously during its mission time, and in cases in which very high reliability is needed, fault tolerance (FT) techniques are used. Moreover, these systems are often deployed in dynamic environments where the operational conditions may change in an unpredictable manner. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in creating DECSs that are capable of modifying their behavior autonomously and dynamically in response to unexpectedly changing requirements or conditions. In recent years, there is a growing trend toward using Ethernet as the network technology for DECSs. Unfortunately, the original specification of this technology lacks appropriate services to fulfill the most demanding requirements of industrial systems. In this regard, many Ethernet-based protocols and standards have been proposed along the past years to deal with these limitations. In this paper, we survey solutions that have been proposed to achieve FT in Ethernet-based DECSs, considering faults both in their nodes and communication subsystem. In addition, we discuss adaptive FT techniques that can be used to increase the flexibility of adaptive DECS. Finally, we identify future trends and open challenges to build highly reliable DECS in the future.
The key prerequisite for experience-driven design is to define what experience to design for. User experience (UX) goals concretise the intended experience. Based on our own case studies from ...industrial environments and a literature study, we propose five different approaches to acquiring insight and inspiration for UX goal setting: Brand, Theory, Empathy, Technology, and Vision. Each approach brings in a different viewpoint, thus supporting the multidisciplinary character of UX. The Brand approach ensures that the UX goals are in line with the company's brand promise. The Theory approach utilises the available scientific knowledge of human behaviour. The Empathy approach focuses on knowing the actual users and stepping into their shoes. The Technology approach considers the new technologies that are being introduced and their positive or negative influence on UX. Finally, the Vision approach focuses on renewal, introducing new kinds of UXs. In the design of industrial systems, several stakeholders are involved and they should share common design goals. Using the different UX goal-setting approaches together brings in the viewpoints of different stakeholders, thus committing them to UX goal setting and emphasising UX as a strategic design decision.
Almost every sufficiently complex software system today is configurable.
Conditional compilation
is a simple variability-implementation mechanism that is widely used in open-source projects and ...industry. Especially, the C preprocessor (CPP) is very popular in practice, but it is also gaining (again) interest in academia. Although there have been several attempts to understand and improve CPP, there is a lack of understanding of how it is used in open-source and industrial systems and whether different usage patterns have emerged. The background is that much research on configurable systems and product lines concentrates on open-source systems, simply because they are available for study in the first place. This leads to the potentially problematic situation that it is unclear whether the results obtained from these studies are transferable to industrial systems. We aim at lowering this gap by comparing the use of CPP in open-source projects and industry—especially from the embedded-systems domain—based on a substantial set of subject systems and well-known variability metrics, including size, scattering, and tangling metrics. A key result of our empirical study is that, regarding almost all aspects we studied, the analyzed open-source systems and the considered embedded systems from industry are similar regarding most metrics, including systems that have been developed in industry and made open source at some point. So, our study indicates that, regarding CPP as variability-implementation mechanism, insights, methods, and tools developed based on studies of open-source systems are transferable to industrial systems—at least, with respect to the metrics we considered.
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