This paper presents results from a case study in predictive maintenance at a distribution warehouse. A simulation model was built with ARENA 5.0 for integrating predictive maintenance strategies with production planning strategies, for a conveyor system. Equipment health was monitored using condition-based parameters such as temperature and vibration for mechanical and electrical components su...

Bottled-beverage production systems require considerable machinery and sophisticated control systems. A malfunction in the system can result machine stoppages, thereby decreasing productivity resulting output not meeting required target. Therefore, problem of frequent stoppages must be resolved. The ‘Fast Restart Function’ is a proposed feature that help reduce downtime by time for product to d...

Editor’s Note: Harold C. Seim, MD, MPH, has been the predoctoral director in the Department of Family Practice and Community Health at the University of Minnesota for 12 years. O. Guy Johnson, MD, is a clinical professor in the department and has precepted students in his clinic continuously for the past 30 years. In this month’s column, Drs Seim and Johnson present practical, time-saving tips ...

Earlier virtual machine (VM) migration techniques consisted of stop-and-copy: the VM was stopped, its address space was copied to a different physical machine, and the VM was restarted at that machine. Recent VM hypervisors support live VM migration, which allows pages to be copied while the VM is running. If any copied page is dirtied (i.e., modified), it has to be copied again. The process st...

In this paper, a real maintenance workforce-constrained scheduling problem is formulated as a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model with the aim of simultaneously minimizing the workforce requirements and maximizing the equipment availability. The skilled workforce is provided by internal and external resources using regular time, overtime and contracting. The equipment availability is m...

This paper proposes the use of on-line scheduling in human telesupervision of robot teams to determine and maximize the number of robots a human operator can manage at once. To maximize the number of robots in a team, the doubleShifted Shortest Processing Time (dSSPT) algorithm was proposed for this purpose. This scheduling algorithm has the objective of minimizing total downtime (or flow time)...

Patching, upgrading, and maintaining operating system software is a growing management complexity problem that can result in unacceptable system downtime. We introduce AutoPod, a system that enables unscheduled operating system updates while preserving application service availability. AutoPod provides a group of processes and associated users with an isolated machineindependent virtualized env...

It is time for the systems community of researchers and developers to broaden the agenda beyond performance. The 10000X increase in performance over the last 20 years means that other aspects of computing have risen in relative importance. We see three challenges for the future as [Patterson2002a]: 1. Synergy with humanity: We need to make the technology match human nature, both for users of pe...

Aerospace, vehicle and technology sectors all depend heavily on through-life recording, reviewing and managing user, support and technical data: from design, through in-service support, to disposal. The ability to exploit this kind of data efficiently and effectively is vital to improving safety, reliability, maintainability, supportability and affordability. The volume, inconsistency and relev...