Seminario: Sequence Planner– integrating research results in practice
Abstract: It is a big challenge for us, researchers in the discrete event
systems community, to use our research results in practice. There are a
number of reasons for this, for example that it is hard to model the
problems (and usually impossible to do for people not in the research
group), and that it is hard to solve real world problems. But another
reason is that research result usually requires significant effort from
the practitioners as well changes to their working procedure, which
makes it hard for us researcher to motivate them to start using our
tools.
The last 8 years, our research group has been working with a software
tool called sequence planner. The aim was initially to improve the
modeling and analysis of automation system including verification,
synthesis and optimization. But the tool was not used by practitioners
until we included simple services for aggregating data from robotized
automation system as well as emergency departments at hospitals. We
developed a simple yet powerful concept called the tweeting factory
(which also works really well in e.g. healthcare systems) for
visualizing and analyzing live data. The interesting effect of this was
that the use for our latest research results suddenly was of interest to
the users.
During the talk, I will present the tool and some of the results we have
had the last years. Especially the live data visualization, prediction
services as well as energy optimization of robot stations where we can
save up to 30% of the energy consumption of a robot.