Efficient management of available technologies. Aplication to mining operations for industry supplies

Nowadays, processing Industry Sector is going through a series of changes, including right management and reduction of environmental affections. Any productive process which looks for sustainable management is incomplete if Cycle of Life of mineral resources sustainability is not taken into account. Raw materials for manufacturing are provided by mineral resources extraction processes, such as copper, aluminum, iron, gold, silver, silicon, titanium? Those elements are necessary for Mankind development and are obtained from the Earth through mineral extractive processes. Mineral extraction processes are operations which must take care about the environmental consequences. Extraction of huge volumes of rock for their transformation into raw materials for industry must be optimized to reduce ecological cost of the final product as l was possible. Reducing the ecological balance on a global scale has no sense to design an efficient manufacturing in secondary industry (transformation), if in first steps of the supply chain (extraction) impact exceeds the savings of resources in successive phases. Mining operations size suggests that it is an environmental aggressive activity, but precisely because of its great impact must be the first element to be considered. That idea implies that a new concept born: Reduce economical and environmental cost This work aims to make a reflection on the parameters that can be modified to reduce the energy cost of the process without an increasing in operational costs and always ensuring the same production capacity. That means minimize economic and environmental cost at same time. An efficient design of mining operation which has taken into account that idea does not implies an increasing of the operating cost. To get this objective is necessary to think in global operation view to make that all departments involved have common guidelines which make you think in the optimization of global energy costs. Sometimes a single operational cost must be increased to reduce global cost. This work makes a review through different design parameters of surface mining setting some key performance indicators (KPIs) which are estimated from an efficient point of view. Those KPIs can be included by HQE Policies as global indicators. The new concept developed is that a new criteria has to be applied in company policies: improve management, improving OPERATIONAL efficiency. That means, that is better to use current resources properly (machinery, equipment,?) than to replace them with new things but not used correctly. As a conclusion, through an efficient management of current technologies in each extractive operation an important reduction of the energy can be achieved looking at downstream in the process. That implies a lower energetic cost in the whole cycle of life in manufactured product.

Adding Usability Mechanisms into Agile Requirements: Tool Support with U-Kunagi

The growing interest for integrating agile methodologies and usability has brought various challenges to practitioners. This research focuses on a specific part of these challenges that is related to the integration of usability mechanisms (features such as cancel, undo, warning, etc.) into agile requirements, usually written in the form of user stories. For this aim, a framework has been developed, conformed first by a well-defined modeling language that aims to formalize previous empirical research in the field, models of the impact of usability mechanisms into user stories, and a tool to help practitioners applying them to user stories. Results show that the use of this framework helps agile developers to think about usability from the beginning of the development process, without needing to be an expert in the subject. Our proposal can therefore complement other usability practices to improve the quality of use of software developed using agile methodologies.

MIRACLE at Ad-Hoc CLEF 2005: Merging and Combining Without Using a Single Approach

This paper presents the 2005 Miracle’s team approach to the Ad-Hoc Information Retrieval tasks. The goal for the experiments this year was twofold: to continue testing the effect of combination approaches on information retrieval tasks, and improving our basic processing and indexing tools, adapting them to new languages with strange encoding schemes. The starting point was a set of basic components: stemming, transforming, filtering, proper nouns extraction, paragraph extraction, and pseudo-relevance feedback. Some of these basic components were used in different combinations and order of application for document indexing and for query processing. Second-order combinations were also tested, by averaging or selective combination of the documents retrieved by different approaches for a particular query. In the multilingual track, we concentrated our work on the merging process of the results of monolingual runs to get the overall multilingual result, relying on available translations. In both cross-lingual tracks, we have used available translation resources, and in some cases we have used a combination approach.

Ontology driven description and engineering of autonomous systems: application to process system engineering

Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any form of external control for extended periods of time. Autonomy is a desired goal for every system as it improves its performance, safety and profit. Ontologies are a way to conceptualize the knowledge of a specific domain. In this paper an ontology for the description of autonomous systems as well as for its development (engineering) is presented and applied to a process. This ontology is intended to be applied and used to generate final applications following a model driven methodology.

A systematic mapping study on the open source software development process.

Abstract?Background: There is no globally accepted open source software development process to define how open source software is developed in practice. A process description is important for coordinating all the software development activities involving both people and technology. Aim: The research question that this study sets out to answer is: What activities do open source software process models contain? The activity groups on which it focuses are Concept Exploration, Software Requirements, Design, Maintenance and Evaluation. Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS). A SMS is a form of systematic literature review that aims to identify and classify available research papers concerning a particular issue. Results: We located a total of 29 primary studies, which we categorized by the open source software project that they examine and by activity types (Concept Exploration, Software Requirements, Design, Maintenance and Evaluation). The activities present in most of the open source software development processes were Execute Tests and Conduct Reviews, which belong to the Evaluation activities group. Maintenance is the only group that has primary studies addressing all the activities that it contains. Conclusions: The primary studies located by the SMS are the starting point for analyzing the open source software development process and proposing a process model for this community. The papers in our paper pool that describe a specific open source software project provide more regarding our research question than the papers that talk about open source software development without referring to a specific open source software project.

Vibrations loads in the process of designing scientific spacecraft payloads

Scientific missions constitute fundamental cornerstones of space agencies such as ESA and NASA. Modern astronomy could not be understood without the data provided by these missions. Scientists need to design very carefully onboard instruments. Payloads have to survive the crucial launch moment and later perform well in the really harsh space environ-ment. It is very important that the instrument conceptual idea can be engineered to sustain all those loads

A formalism and method for representing and reasoning with process models authored by subject matter experts

Enabling Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to formulate knowledge without the intervention of Knowledge Engineers (KEs) requires providing SMEs with methods and tools that abstract the underlying knowledge representation and allow them to focus on modeling activities. Bridging the gap between SME-authored models and their representation is challenging, especially in the case of complex knowledge types like processes, where aspects like frame management, data, and control flow need to be addressed. In this paper, we describe how SME-authored process models can be provided with an operational semantics and grounded in a knowledge representation language like F-logic in order to support process-related reasoning. The main results of this work include a formalism for process representation and a mechanism for automatically translating process diagrams into executable code following such formalism. From all the process models authored by SMEs during evaluation 82% were well-formed, all of which executed correctly. Additionally, the two optimizations applied to the code generation mechanism produced a performance improvement at reasoning time of 25% and 30% with respect to the base case, respectively.

Nagele, a green building without a roof

The paper shows the design process of Nagele, a Dutch modernist agrarian settlement designed during the Post-Second World War period by the internationally recognized group of architects De 8 en Opbouw: Rietveld, Van Eesteren, Merkelbach, van Eyck, Bakema, Stam, Ruys, etc. It is located in the Noordoostpolder (NOP), in the Flevoland province, which was entirely reclaimed from the sea. The country planning of the Noodoostpolder reveals a high rationalization in the disposal of roads, canals, cities, agrarian land and forests, which can be an inspiration for the cities of today. The configurational elements of Nagele must be understood in terms of their relationship to the overall system of the polder. Important territorial principles in structure, form and landscape can be seen in the project of Nagele. This relationship is an additional example of the continuing transformation that the entire length and breadth of The Netherlands in subjected to. The research developed to date reveals a plan which shows the evolution of functionalistic paradigm at the CIAM postwar congresses. The particular case of Nagele points to the incorporation of human scale, green design and social co-existence. The source of these theories mainly came from Aldo van Eyck, who played an important role during the second phase of design. The research will be developed analyzing his drawings and texts and will show the way his theories appear in the project. Can Nagele be a materialization of Van Eyck¿s ideas? Nagele constitutes one of the most outstanding contributions to modern urban planning as far as both urbanism and landscape, are at the service of human well-being. Not only were urban independently designed parts, but their relationships also formed a perfect urban whole.