Out of 100 hours of engineering work, only 20 are dedicated to real engineering and 80 are spent on what is considered as routine activities. Readjusting the ratio of innovative vs. routine work is a considerable challenge in the product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy. Therefore, the main objective is to develop an approach in order to accelerate routine processes in engineering design. The proposed methodology called FabK consists of capturing manufacturing knowledge and its application towards the design verification and validation of new engineering designs. The approach is implemented into a Web-based PLM prototype and a Computer Aided Design system. A series of experiments from an industrial case study is introduced to provide significant results.

Humanoid robots present exciting research possibilities such as human gaits, social interaction, and even creativity. Full-size humanoid designs have shown impressive capabilities, yet are custom-built and expensive. Cost and sophistication barriers make reproducing and verifying results very difficult. The recent proliferation of mini-humanoids presents an affordable alternative, in that smaller robots are cheaper to own and simpler to operate. At less than 2000 USD, these robots are capable of human-like motion, yet lack precision sensors and processing power. The authors’ goal is to produce a miniature humanoid robot that is both small and affordable, while capable of advanced dynamic walking and running. This requires sensing of the robot’s inertia and velocity, the forces on its feet, and the ability to generate and modify motion commands in real time. The presented design uses commercial parts and simple machining methods to minimize cost. A power-efficient mobile x86 computer on-board leverages existing operating systems and simplifies software development. Preliminary results demonstrate controlled walking and feedback control.

In the United States, two thirds of the carbon monoxide and about one third of carbon dioxide emissions come from the transportation sector. Ways to reduce these emissions in the future include replacing gasoline and diesel by biofuels, or by blend of biofuels with conventional gasoline and diesel, or by compressed natural gas (CNG), or by replacing internal combustion engines by electric motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells or battery-powered electric vehicles recharged from the electric grid. This presentation will review these technologies the fuel production pathways, when they are likely to be available, and by what fraction transportation sector green house gas emissions could be reduced by each. A well-to-wheels (WTW) analysis is performed on each vehicle/ fuel technology using the GREET model and the total energy use, the CO 2 emissions, NO x emissions, SO x emissions for the life cycle of the vehicle technologies are calculated. Prospects for reducing foreign oil dependence as well as mitigating green house gases emission from the transportation sector will be considered in the analysis.

Outsourcing has advanced to an important measure that is applied broadly in operations management. Nowadays, suppliers of manufacturing companies do not only provide direct material like raw material and operational supplements but offer components and advanced modules incurring many value-adding stages. Whereas in the past companies built up local supplier networks, they recently tend to search for global sources. However, not all companies reach their expectations towards the success of global sourcing projects. Important reasons for relocating manufacturing capacities back to local suppliers or in- house manufacturing are costs for unexpected coordination activities, limited flexibility and declined or fluctuating quality. The theory of Transaction Cost Economics postulates that transaction costs of the types information, communication and coordination determine the governance structure of a supply chain, i.e. market, hybrid or firm. The objective of this paper is to analyze the cause-and-effect chain of inter-firm transaction costs concerning global sourcing. The resulting qualitative model is based on explorative multiple-case study.

The digital divide describes the gap among individuals, house- holds, businesses and geographic areas on socio-economic level, as well as unequal opportunities to access information and communication technologies (ICTs). Castells holds the view that informationalism of shifting global networks creates a vola- tile and ruthless world. Those who do not contribute to the new world economies are discarded. Consequently, much of Africa is condemned to information black holes as Africa becomes the graveyard of failed ICT development programmes. However, by sharing expertise and goodwill, worldwide university networks of science and technology can reverse the inequities brought about by informationalism. We have a shared academic respon- sibility to explore feasible research frameworks on the use of ICT in developing contexts. Bronfenbrenner maintains that the ecology of human development is experimental by nature and design. From his Human Ecological Systems Theory we propose a research framework for the development of socially transfor- mative ICT goals for implementation and validation at the School for Continuing Teacher Education at the North-West University, South Africa.

To be successful in today’s workplace, engineering and computer science students must possess high levels of teamwork skills. Unfortunately, most engineering programs provide little or no specific instruction in this area. This paper outlines an assessment-driven approach toward teaching teamwork skills. Working with the Industrial Advisory Board for the College, a set of performance criteria for teamwork was developed. This set of criteria was used to build an assessment instrument to measure the extent to which students are able to achieve the necessary skills. This set of criteria provides a clear basis for the development of an approach toward teaching teamwork skills. Furthermore, the results from the assessment can be used to adjust the teaching techniques to address the particular skills where students show some weaknesses. Although this effort is in the early stages, the approach seems promising and will be improved over time.

In this paper, the novel Delay Weighted Priority Scheduling (DWPS) algorithm proposed for the management of cellular network

The binary feature vector is one of the most common representations of patterns and measuring similarity and distance measures play a critical role in many problems such as clustering, classification, etc. Ever since Jaccard proposed a similarity measure to classify ecological species in 1901, numerous binary similarity and distance measures have been proposed in various fields. Applying appropriate measures results in more accurate data analysis. Notwithstanding, few comprehensive surveys on binary measures have been conducted. Hence we collected 76 binary similarity and distance measures used over the last century and reveal their correlations through the hierarchical clustering technique.

One of the key points in Model-Driven Development is to provide a semantic anchoring that permits to design an application based on some common semantics but at the same time independently of the specific characteristics of the final platform. This paper proposes a common meta-model capable of holding both state machine and data flow semantics, two of the most used behaviour models. This is done so that application behaviour can be described independently of the specific platform. The application behaviour can be based on the semantics of this meta- model while at the same time code can be generated for several specific platforms without changing the application design.

The use of optical fibers for power transmission has been investigated intensely. An optically powered device combined with optical data transfer offers several advantages compared to systems using electrical connections. Optical transmission systems consist of a light source, a transmission medium and a light receiver. The overall system performance depends on the efficiency of opto-electronic converter devices, temperature and illumination dependent losses, attenuation of the transmission medium and coupling between transmitter and fiber. This paper will summarize the state of the art for optically powered systems and will discuss reasons for negative influences on efficiency. Furthermore, an outlook on power transmission by the use of a new technology for creating polymer optical fibers (POF) via micro dispensing will be given. This technology is capable to decrease coupling losses by direct contacting of opto-electronic devices.

Virtual, online maps and globes allow for volunteered geographic information to capitalize on users as sensors and generate unprecedented access to information resources and services. These new “Web 2.0” applications will probably dominate development and use of virtual globes and maps in the near future. We present an experimental platform that integrates an existing virtual globe interface with added functionality as follows; an interactive layer on top of the existing map that support real time creation and manipulation of spatial interaction objects. These objects, together with the existing information delivered through the virtual globe, form a game board that can be used for educational purposes.

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are complex systems. For their operations, these infrastructures are increasingly using Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Management practices are therefore highly dependent on the cyber tools, but also on the data needed to make these tools work. Therefore, CIs are greatly vulnerable to degradation of data. In this context, this paper aims at presenting the fundamentals of a method for analyzing the vulnerabilities of CIs towards the use of cyber data. By characterizing cyber vulnerability of CIs, it will be possible to improve the resilience of these networks and to foster a proactive approach to risk management not only by considering cybernetics from a cyber-attack point of view but also by considering the consequences of the use of corrupted data.

We discuss the design of Netposse, a tool that matches people in online communities based on their intellectual and professional interests. We frame the motivation of this tool around current research on how learners can leverage social communities for maximum benefit. Given this literature, we present a design for Netposse that mines data from existing web assets and matches people according to their areas of expertise. In addition to matching individuals, such a system serves the purpose of query answering as well: it allows users to search and identify others in the community whose background qualifies them to provide advice on a user’s topic of interest.

NewsPaperBox * propounds an alternative visual model utilizing the treemap algorithm to represent the collective use of a website that evolves in response to user interaction. While the technology currently exists to track various user behaviors such as number of clicks, duration of stay on a given web site, these statistics are not yet employed to influence the visual representation of that site’s design in real time. In that sense, this project propounds an alternative modeling of a representational outlook of a website that is developed by collaborations and competitions of its global users. This paper proposes the experience of cyberspace as a generative process driven by its effective user participation.

The MOPEM project includes two fixed scenarios that have been defined to convey the idea of “learning paths”. Our aim in this paper is to demonstrate the contexts and conditions for flexible learning paths that can be tailored to meet individual needs. The concept of this kind of specialised path is to enable learners to individualise the learning process and to adjust it to their personal needs. We will outline the background and pro- vide examples to explain the concept of learning stations which we use in our four courses: Online Marketing, CRM Systems, Business Communications and Event Marketing. This idea of “freely” combining subject matter naturally leads to the ques- tion of multi-applicability for the learning blocks in various educational contexts. The answers to this question are interest- ing not only in terms of the feasibility of learning paths from a content and didactic point of view, but also with regard to the economic viability of E-Learning or Blended Learning Systems, which ultimately require technical implementation. In addition we will present some first thoughts on the design of a prototype “Content Pool”. It would, however, only make sense to develop and implement this within the scope of a follow-up project.

Bus transit network modeling is a complex and combinatorial problem. The main purpose of this paper is to apply a contemporary method for designing a bus transit network with the objective of achieving optimum results. The method is called Ant Algorithms, a Meta Heuristic method, which has been applied to optimization problems in transportation with noticeable success. The description of the algorithm, as well as the main methodology and computations, is presented in this paper. Furthermore, a case study using Ant Algorithms applied to the city of Ghazvin, one of the most important suburbs of Tehran, Iran, is presented.