Product Family Research Articles

Volatile sensation: The chemical ecology of the earthy odorant geosmin.

Geosmin may be the most familiar volatile compound, as it lends the earthy smell to soil. The compound is a member of the largest family of natural products, the terpenoids. The broad distribution of geosmin among bacteria in both terrestrial and aquatic environments suggests that this compound has an important ecological function, for example, as a signal (attractant or repellent) or as a protective specialized metabolite against biotic and abiotic stresses. While geosmin is part of our everyday life, scientists still do not understand the exact biological function of this omnipresent natural product. This minireview summarizes the current general observations regarding geosmin in prokaryotes and introduces new insights into its biosynthesis and regulation, as well as its biological roles in terrestrial and aquatic environments.

Disentangling Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Compositions

We present a measurement study on compositions of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols, which aim to disrupt traditional finance and offer services on top of distributed ledgers, such as Ethereum. Understanding DeFi compositions is of great importance, as they may impact the development of ecosystem interoperability, are increasingly integrated with web technologies, and may introduce risks through complexity. Starting from a dataset of 23 labeled DeFi protocols and 10,663,881 associated Ethereum accounts, we study the interactions of protocols and associated smart contracts. From a network perspective, we find that decentralized exchange (DEX) and lending protocol account nodes have high degree and centrality values, that interactions among protocol nodes primarily occur in a strongly connected component, and that known community detection methods cannot disentangle DeFi protocols. Therefore, we propose an algorithm to decompose a protocol call into a nested set of building blocks that may be part of other DeFi protocols. This allows us to untangle and study protocol compositions. With a ground truth dataset that we have collected, we can demonstrate the algorithm’s capability by finding that swaps are the most frequently used building blocks. As building blocks can be nested, that is, contained in each other, we provide visualizations of composition trees for deeper inspections. We also present a broad picture of DeFi compositions by extracting and flattening the entire nested building block structure across multiple DeFi protocols. Finally, to demonstrate the practicality of our approach, we present a case study that is inspired by the recent collapse of the UST stablecoin in the Terra ecosystem. Under the hypothetical assumption that the stablecoin USD Tether would experience a similar fate, we study which building blocks — and, thereby, DeFi protocols — would be affected. Overall, our results and methods contribute to a better understanding of a new family of financial products.

Achieving batch-size-of-one production model in robot flexible assembly cells

Manufacturing industry is facing new challenges in that fast-changing demands for products and services from customers push manufacturers to be more flexible and adaptive. The concept of batch-size-of-one production is presented in this paper, which defines a fully automated, highly customised, and short lead time production model. The desired batch-size-of-one production model is a promising solution for the above challenges in manufacturing industry, especially for highly customised or families of similar products like in the mobile phone industry. Along with the concept, we introduce a novel control method that enables the desired batch-size-of-one production model in operation of robots in manufacturing and assembly systems. The strategy was developed for robot control based on a distributed system to enable industrial robots to receive job commands on the fly and to conduct different jobs without the need for reconfiguration and reprogramming and without overheads. The aim of the research is to create the basis for a fully automated robot flexible assembly cell to perform batch-size-of-one assembly tasks with minimal human involvement by eliminating interruptions from the reconfiguration and reprogramming processes. The proposed strategy has been validated in practice in a multi-robot, multi-product flexible assembly cell.

Advances in the Rheology of Synthetic Binder for Sustainable Road Pavements: An Improved Protocol for DSR Testing

Bituminous binders are thermal-dependent visco-elastic materials commonly used in pavement engineering. However, synthetic binders represent quite a new family of products that can be used in the substitution of conventional binders with various purposes. Among them, clear synthetic resins recently experienced a quick diffusion since they can be employed in the production of sustainable road pavements (which address aesthetic concerns, thermal aspects, etc.). Since specific studies addressing the rheological modeling of clear synthetic binders cannot be found in the literature, the purpose of this research is setting up an advanced rheological protocol to characterize such materials, bridging the existing knowledge gap. An extensive laboratory investigation with the dynamic shear rheometer was carried out in oscillatory mode (amplitude and frequency sweeps) to analyze the stress–strain state of such binders. An innovative test at a constant strain rate was used to construct non-linear master curves, overcoming various criticisms about the stress state of the binder when subjected to time-dependent deformations. Results indicated that, using non-linear data, horizontal and vertical shift factors (functions of temperature and strain rate) can be modeled through power law equations to obtain the master curves. This method was considered suitable for depicting the rheological response of the binders displaying such complex behaviors.

Modelling and application of hierarchical joint optimisation for modular product family and supply chain architecture

Modelling and application of hierarchical joint optimisation for modular product family and supply chain architecture

Deploying automated ticket router across the enterprise

AbstractWith the recent advances in machine learning, the use of natural language processing (NLP) technology to support various business processes has been increasing. This paper discusses the use of NLP to route more than one million live client tickets annually to the appropriate service personnel in 67 support missions across IBM. Each mission supports a product family with multiple support teams, each requiring different skills for the engineers. We discuss three important aspects of such a large‐scale deployment: (i) The use of a centralized team with a common machine learning infrastructure and practices to support the entire enterprise. (ii) The processes and quality of such a deployment from the perspective of one support mission, namely, IBM's z/OS family. (iii) Careful monitoring of the deployed models to detect drifts in the routing behavior. Despite vast differences in the technical contents of the support missions, it is possible to define common processes and metrics across the enterprise, without requiring a dedicated machine learning team for each mission. In addition, we provide examples of the business policies and metrics from the perspective of the z/OS mission to demonstrate the utility of the approach and the outcome.

Identification and Characterization of Phytocyanin Family Genes in Cotton Genomes

Phytocyanins (PCs) are a class of plant-specific blue copper proteins that have been demonstrated to play a role in electron transport and plant development. Through analysis of the copper ligand residues, spectroscopic properties, and domain architecture of the protein, PCs have been grouped into four subfamilies: uclacyanins (UCs), stellacyanins (SCs), plantacyanins (PLCs), and early nodulin-like proteins (ENODLs). The present study aimed to identify and characterise the PCs present in three distinct cotton species (Gossypium hirsutum, Gossyium arboreum, and Gossypium raimondii) through the identification of 98, 63, and 69 genes respectively. We grouped PCs into four clades by using bioinformatics analysis and sequence alignment, which exhibit variations in gene structure and motif distribution. PCs are distributed across all chromosomes in each of the three species, with varying numbers of exons per gene and multiple conserved motifs, and with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 11 exons found on one gene. Transcriptomic data and qRT-PCR analysis revealed that two highly differentiated PC genes were expressed at the fibre initiation stage, while three highly differentiated PCs were expressed at the fibre elongation stage. These findings serve as a foundation for further investigations aimed at understanding the contribution of this gene family in cotton fibre production.

Bioinformatic Analysis Reveals both Oversampled and Underexplored Biosynthetic Diversity in Nonribosomal Peptides.

The traditional natural product discovery approach has accessed only a fraction of the chemical diversity in nature. The use of bioinformatic tools to interpret the instructions encoded in microbial biosynthetic genes has the potential to circumvent the existing methodological bottlenecks and greatly expand the scope of discovery. Structural prediction algorithms for nonribosomal peptides (NRPs), the largest family of microbial natural products, lie at the heart of this new approach. To understand the scope and limitation of the existing prediction algorithms, we evaluated their performances on NRP synthetase biosynthetic gene clusters. Our systematic analysis shows that the NRP biosynthetic landscape is uneven. Phenylglycine and its derivatives as a group of NRP building blocks (BBs), for example, have been oversampled, reflecting an extensive historical interest in the glycopeptide antibiotics family. In contrast, the benzoyl BB, including 2,3-dihydroxybenzoate (DHB), has been the most underexplored, hinting at the possibility of a reservoir of as yet unknown DHB containing NRPs with functional roles other than a siderophore. Our results also suggest that there is still vast unexplored biosynthetic diversity in nature, and the analysis presented herein shall help guide and strategize future natural product discovery campaigns. We also discuss possible ways bioinformaticians and biochemists could work together to improve the existing prediction algorithms.

Evaluation of Precipitation Estimates from Remote Sensing and Artificial Neural Network Based Products (PERSIANN) Family in an Arid Region

Accurate and continuous rainfall monitoring is essential for effective water resources management, especially in arid and semi-arid regions such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Significant spatio-temporal precipitation variation in the UAE necessitates the use of the latest techniques to measure rainfall intensity accurately. This study investigates the consistency and applicability of four satellite precipitation products, namely PERSIANN, PERSIANN-CCS, PERSIANN-CDR, and PDIR-Now, over the UAE. Daily time series data from 2011 to 2020 were analyzed using various statistical measures and climate indices to develop the belief in the products and for their inter-comparison. The analysis revealed that the average probability of detection (POD) for PDIR and CDR was the highest, with values ranging from 0.7–0.9 and 0.6–0.9, respectively. Similarly, CDR has a better Heidke Skill Score (HSS) with an average value of 0.26. CDR outperformed its counterparts with an average correlation coefficient value of 0.70 vs. 0.65, 0.40, and 0.34 for PDIR, CCS, and PERSIANN, respectively. Precipitation indices analysis revealed that all the products overestimated the number of consecutive wet days by 15–20%, while underestimating consecutive dry days by 5–10%. The quantitative estimations indicate that all the products were matching with the gauge values during the wet months (January–April), while they showed significant overestimation during the dry months. CDR and PDIR were in close agreement with the gauge data in terms of maximum daily rainfall with an error of less than 10% for both products. As compared to others, PERSIANN-CDR provided better estimates, particularly in terms of capturing extreme rainfall events and spatial distribution of rainfall. This study provides the first comprehensive evaluation of four PERSIANN family products based on recent daily rainfall data of UAE. The findings can provide future insights into the applicability and improvement of PERSIANN products in arid and semi-arid regions.

Capabilities and skills for manufacturing planning in an automotive use case scenario

Abstract The necessity for increased flexibility in production and handling of high-variant product families is a strong trend in Industry 4.0 scenarios. A promising approach to achieve this is to replace the rigid programming of the manufacturing management systems by a declarative description of machines and their functionality. This allows for a dynamic allocation of tasks to resources. This paper reports the ongoing work on applying the concept of capabilities and skills to an industrial application example in order to investigate its potential benefits. To apply the abstract concept of capabilities and skills to the production scenario it is implemented using specific technologies. These include Semantic Web ontologies, constraint solving methods and OPC UA for skill invocation and communication.

Needs of parents and carers of children and young people with mental health difficulties: protocol for a systematic review

IntroductionHaving a child or young person (CYP) with mental health problems can be highly distressing for parents/carers. The impact can include parental/carer depression, anxiety, lost productivity and poor family relationships....

New Nostocyclophanes from Nostoc linckia.

Six new nostocyclophanes and four known compounds have been isolated from Nostoc linckia (Nostocaceae) cyanobacterial strain UTEX B1932. The new compounds, nostocyclophanes E-J (1-6), were characterized by NMR and MS techniques. The known compounds were nostocyclophanes B-D, previously isolated from this strain, and dedichloronostocyclophane D. Structural modifications on the new [7.7]paracyclophane analogs 1-5, isolated from the 80% methanol fraction, range from simple changes such as the lack of methylation or halogenation to more unusual modifications such as those seen in nostocyclophane H (4), in which the exocyclic alkyl chains are of different length; this is the first time this modification has been observed in this family of natural products. In addition, nostocyclophane J (6) is a linear analog in which C-20 is chlorinated in preparation for the presumed enzymatic Friedel-Craft cyclization needed to form the final ring structure, analogous to the biosynthesis of the related cylindrocyclophanes. Nostocyclophane D, dedichloronostocyclophane D, and nostocyclophanes E-J demonstrated moderate to weak growth inhibition against MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells.

Analytic model to predict productivity in divisional Seru production environment

Advanced production environments emerged as the good solution to address the modern market challenges asking for a wide product mix and low time to market. Within cellular systems, made of independent, modular and flexible working areas, tailored on families of similar products, Serus are of increasing adoption for both manufacturing and assembly tasks. Among them, the so-called divisional Serus are the first step to move from the traditional production lines to a production environment made of a set of identical working areas, parallelising activities and enabling potential productivity increase. Despite their adoption in industry, starting from the electronic sector and moving forward, reference analytic models to predict divisional Seru productivity are rare in the literature, while their formulation and application is a gap to fill. This paper addresses this gap in theory, supporting the transition toward Seru production environment by proposing and proofing the analytic closed-form expressions getting the expected productivity of a divisional Seru made of a generic number of workers and a) one (base case), b) two (extension) and c) a generic number (general case) of product types to produce. Together with the steps to get the productivity expressions for these three cases of immediate practical applicability and not yet proposed by the literature, a case study and sensitivity analysis on the divisional Seru dimension showcase the proposed model industrial use and impact on the expected productivity. Key results highlight a stationary behaviour of the working time for all workers making the Seru productivity dependent on the sum of the workers speed and the product type workloads.

Computer-Aided Formalization of Internal Consistent Product Family Models

The product line approach enables the rapid building of software products by reusing core assets. How to manage the commonality and variability of product family is the core problem of product line engineering. The feature modeling approach is one of the main approaches to solve this problem. However, this approach does not define the internal functions of features. Some researchers use formal descriptions to define the function of features, but they do not consider the connection between feature specification and feature model. These product family modeling approaches result in product family models that suffer from inconsistent descriptions, which are difficult to resolve manually. To this end, this paper proposes a computer-aided approach to construct an internally consistent product family model. The method performs an inconsistency check during the formalization of each feature in the given initial feature model, pushing the evolution of the feature model and feature specification. The creation and evolution of feature models are achieved through a template-based feature modeling approach. The method is implemented by means of templates, each of which contains two parts of knowledge: the elements required for a class of feature model, and a way to convert the given elements into a formal description. An inconsistency check is achieved through a rule-based detection approach. Each rule contains two parts: a class of conditions that the feature model and the feature specification satisfy, and the actions to resolve inconsistencies once the conditions are satisfied. We have developed a tool. The tool guides the user to build an internally consistent product family model that contains the feature model and feature specifications. Experiments have shown that our approach can provide effective automation support for the process of formal product family modeling.

Post-war economic recovery policy: experience of the Republic of Korea

The development of a strategy for post-war recovery of Ukraine's economy determines the advisability and importance of taking into account international experience. An urgent task is to assess the possibility to implement those economic policy tools that have proven their practical effectiveness. At the same time, it is necessary to define the reservations and risks associated with the implementation of certain aspects in the recovery policy. The purpose of the article is to identify institutional factors and economic mechanisms that provided the successful post-war recovery and development of the Republic of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. Revealing the positive experience of the restructuring involves the account of historical conditions, and the role of foreign aid and internal sources of economic growth. The author has used the methods of comparative and problem-logical analysis, the institutional-evolutionary approach, the principle of integrability as a basis for the synthesis of empirical and theoretical knowledge, and the methodological approach of F. List regarding the historical conditioning of forms of economic nationalism. It is established that after the end of the Korean War, in 1953–1960, domestic policy and foreign aid were focused on solving the primary tasks of overcoming devastation and hunger. The author considers the forms of interaction between the state, the business environment and foreign aid in ensuring the recovery and development of the economy of the Republic of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to the recommendations aimed at liberalizing the economy with a focus on the development of traditional industries, the government of Park Chung-hee gradually implemented a national strategy aimed at industrialization and achieving global competitiveness on high-tech markets. This was facilitated by the introduction of the national planning system, the financial strategy of public-private partnership, and the support for export-oriented industrial production. The agrarian reform, focused on the development of highly productive family farming, contributed to the consolidation of food self-sufficiency and expansion of the domestic market. The strict policy of the redistribution of donor funds by the state provided a so-called export discipline for big business, thanks to which the national corporations - chaebols - became the drivers of investment and innovation based modernization of the economy. The author defines the main components of the Republic of Korea's success in realizing the national interests of economic development under the conditions of foreign aid in post-war reconstruction. An assessment is made of the possibility and expediency of using South Korean experience in Ukraine.

A multi-objective Bi-level leader-follower joint optimization for concurrent design of product family and assembly system

Incorporating interface modularity into the traditional structural–functional modular-based product family architecture (PFA) is of paramount importance for efficient assembly configuration. The structural–functional modularity for PFA only ensures technical system modularity (TSM) with the increasing complexity of assembly and leads to a high redesign cost. In particular, the individual modules and components are assumed to have equal and/or fixed connection values, thereby overlooking the impact of modularity on the assembly configuration. The major challenge for integrating assemblability into a PFA is determining the optimal granularity of modules under the coherent framework of TSM and interface modularity which is often widely different. Responding to the challenge, a decision hierarchy is presented to describe the concurrent decisions of the PFA and assembly configuration through a multi-objective bi-level leader–follower joint optimization (LFJO). The main objective is to maximize profit by ensuring modules with higher commonality and lower interface complexity, which facilitates the design and assembly processes. Consistent with the bi-level optimization, a multi-objective nested bi-level genetic algorithm (M-NBGA) is developed to solve the bi-level LFJO problem efficiently. Numerical examples (i) demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm, (ii) manifest the benefit of considering the level of interactions to deal with the product architecture, (iii) validate the contribution of interface modularity in reducing assembly complexity, and (iv) reveal the effect of modular granularity on design and assembly cost.

Safety and authenticity risks in heritage food preparation at different types of food service establishments: A case study of Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia, tourism is becoming increasingly popular, and forms an essential element of Vision 2030. Accordingly, food service establishments (FSEs) including hotels, ordinary restaurants, heritage restaurants and productive families (i.e., home-based catering) provide heritage cuisine to tourists. This study aimed to assess the authenticity and safety risks associated with the production of heritage food dishes in different FSEs. An online questionnaire was administered in Saudi Arabia, and a total of 85 culinary professionals from different FSEs responded. The culinary professionals were requested to provide opinions on the frequency of food safety and authenticity risk situations at their FSEs, using a five-point Likert scale. The results indicate that most food safety risk situations occur less frequently in hotels because of strict food safety management systems. In contrast, food safety risk situations are more frequent in ordinary and heritage restaurants, particularly in the absence of personal hygiene requirements. In productive families, most food safety risk situations occur because there are no control systems or inspections. Authenticity risks occur less frequently in productive families and heritage restaurants than in other FSEs. Hotels often/always face authenticity risk situations, such as cooking of heritage dishes by non-Saudi culinary professionals and the use of modern equipment. Ordinary restaurants face the highest risk, mostly because of the limited knowledge and skills of the cooks. Overall, this study provides the first insight into the occurrence of possible safety and authenticity risk situations during the preparation of heritage dishes; this information may contribute to improve the production of safe and authentic heritage dishes in the hospitality industry for tourists and local people.

A Survey of Didemnin Depsipeptide Production in Tistrella.

As one of the first families of marine natural products to undergo clinical trials, the didemnin depsipeptides have played a significant role in inspiring the discovery of marine drugs. Originally developed as anticancer therapeutics, the recent re-evaluation of these compounds including synthetically derived dehydrodidemnin B or Aplidine, has led to their advancement towards antiviral applications. While conventionally associated with production in colonial tunicates of the family Didemnidae, recent studies have identified their biosynthetic gene clusters from the marine-derived bacteria Tistrella mobilis. While these studies confirm the production of didemnin X/Y, the low titer and general lack of understanding of their biosynthesis in Tistrella currently prevents the development of effective microbial or synthetic biological approaches for their production. To this end, we conducted a survey of known species of Tistrella and report on their ability to produce the didemnin depsipeptides. These data were used to develop conditions to produce didemnin B at titers over 15 mg/L.

Cogrowth series for free products of finite groups

Given a finitely generated group with generating set [Formula: see text], we study the cogrowth sequence, which is the number of words of length [Formula: see text] over the alphabet [Formula: see text] that are equal to the identity in the group. This is related to the probability of return for walks on the corresponding Cayley graph. Muller and Schupp proved the generating function of the sequence is algebraic when [Formula: see text] has a finite-index-free subgroup (using a result of Dunwoody). In this work, we make this result effective for free products of finite groups: we determine bounds for the degree and height of the minimal polynomial of the generating function, and determine the minimal polynomial explicitly for some families of free products. Using these results we are able to prove that a gap theorem holds: if [Formula: see text] is a finite symmetric generating set for a group [Formula: see text] and if [Formula: see text] denotes the number of words of length [Formula: see text] over the alphabet [Formula: see text] that are equal to [Formula: see text] then [Formula: see text] is either [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] or at least [Formula: see text].

Evaluating state-of-the-art # SAT solvers on industrial configuration spaces

Product lines are widely used to manage families of products that share a common base of features. Typically, not every combination (configuration) of features is valid. Feature models are a de facto standard to specify valid configurations and allow standardized analyses on the variability of the underlying system. A large variety of such analyses depends on computing the number of valid configurations. To analyze feature models, they are typically translated to propositional logic. This allows to employ # SAT solvers that compute the number of satisfying assignments of the propositional formula translated from a feature model. However, the # SAT problem is generally assumed to be even harder than SAT and its scalability when applied to feature models has only been explored sparsely. Our main contribution is an investigation of the performance of off-the-shelf # SAT solvers on computing the number of valid configurations for industrial feature models. We empirically evaluate 21 publicly available # SAT solvers on 130 feature models from 15 subject systems. Our results indicate that current solvers master a majority of the evaluated systems (13/15) with the fastest solvers requiring less than one second for each successfully evaluated feature model. However, there are two complex systems for which none of the evaluated solvers scales. For the given experiment design, the solvers that consumed the least runtime are sharpSAT (2.5 seconds in sum for the 13 systems) and Ganak (3.5 seconds).