Life and FORTRAN revival

Wednesday, 3 February 2021

2020 - Year of the lockdown

2020 - A strange year all in all - but major progress was made!

The potted history;

Project work rolled in throughout the year which was very good for business finances.
Big ticket item is that we finally delivered the 25 Manchester Metrolink Safety Cases for Thales - after 5 years!
We took up residence in Sensor City offices in Liverpool. Then promptly got moved out to Liverpool Science Park while the SC offices were being 'expanded'. We will see if we ever move back?
We built our rail infrastructure simulator CLAMP Critical Location Acoustic Modification Platform and took many thousands of readings for various void and bridge configurations.
We were planning of running some real field tests with SAIN but lockdown put a stop to that. So we ended up doing runs on CLAMP.
We secured a trial on road bridges in Powys which hopefully we will carry out this year - once we are out of the third lockdown period!
Ten SAIN units are now on delivery from Fossa for this project.
We are also firming up our bridge signature analysis and hope to be presenting the results in Mallorca at the Civil Comp conference in 2021.

So all in all not such a bad year. Our caravan in Wales has helped tremendously - many weeks were spent there planning and researching which otherwise would not have happened!

Onward and upward.....

Saturday, 20 July 2019

2018 - where did it all go - just realised I didn't do one of these

I'm slipping - so bit late and a bit brief but this is what we were up to in 2018!

Busy, busy, busy.....the journey continues.

Name of project	Uncertainties at start	Issues arising during project	Further work	Ongoing/Ended
CROAC – app to analyse Costa Rican frog calls.	Could we develop an analysis package to run on mobile phone for identifying calls in the wild.	Difficulties with running complex analysis fast enough on mobile devices. Complexity of the background noise to the calls. Resulting in false calls.	Algorithm needs refining to help reduce false calls.	Ongoing
Rail infrastructure health monitoring.	Could the health of railway infrastructure (points, bridges, tunnels etc) be monitored through their changing sounds.	Difficulty getting access to real railway infrastructure. So we used a model railway to prove the concepts and think through the sensors required. Preliminary analysis showed simplest analysis would be to focus on bridges.	Need to develop sensor to a level where it can be left for a period of time in the field. Need to prove we can identify signals for real railway bridges.	Ongoing
PACE – air-conditioning control system.	Could a new air-conditioning approach be controlled using the new LoRA radio communication protocol and a simple control device.	Control of the peltier cooler was non-trivial requiring significant hardware modifications. LoRA communication setup proved less effective that originally anticipated.	May look to use more standard communication methods.	Ended – proved LoRA is not right for this system.
Wheel slip analysis	Could a big-data approach be used to analyse rail wheel slip occurrences.	Access to appropriate data was difficult to obtain. Data was provided by Siemens in the end but then we ended up with too much data. Effort then had to be expended refining this data.	Initial analysis has demonstrated the technique. Larger data sets are now needed to refine the algorithms.	Ongoing
FOSSA – satellite swarm communications. Effectively he ‘glue’ to communicating and transmitting data from remote monitoring devices using cheap satellite systems.	Could a cube-sat be developed to use the new LoRA communication protocol. Built and launched at low cost.	Difficulties encountered applying the LoRA protocol to the satellite communication time window. Power consumption on the satellite required special design of solar cells.	The cube sat now needs final build then tested and commissioned for flight	Ongoing – launch planned for Sept 2019

Tuesday, 5 February 2019

Nothing to do with me mind - project is one of my trusted advisors projects.

Check out @FossaSys on Twitter for full info.

However, its a great learning ground for my Fortran revival - learning by osmosis about Arduino's and LORA with a bit of programming thrown in (but not too much mind).

Box of tricks just arrived for the schools workshops that are planned to take place over coming months - code to be flown on the satellite.

How cool is that.....beep, beep, beep....

The revival is revived!

Saturday, 10 February 2018

Railway Big Data done small

Workshop now contains our rail simulator!

Why bother building our own you ask?

Well we have had a few negative encounters around :-

Difficulties getting funding
Difficulties getting access to data
Difficulties not giving away IPR

The solution is, therefore, build our own railway - a miniaturized version of course! This does have some issues with scalability however its great for proof of concept stuff and is getting us into real data analysis of multi data streams.

4 Arduinos being installed and coded up ready for all sorts of good stuff!

Onward and upward.....

Wednesday, 27 December 2017

2017 - where did it go?

Long time no blog - life took over!

Things have moved on in business and on the home front.Home front we have moved house finally after 12 months of renovation of the new property 'The Villa' we are now in and up and running. I have my Ohana (office) and Advisory workshop (garage) initiatives in progress.

Work front has been full on. Majority of the year was spent working on a project for Thales, which I think is now under control and can be moved on to the next phase in the New Year. This has been great for consolidating the business and given a bit of 'thinking' time to what needs to be focused on and where funding is going to come from. And its not the following, one thing 2017 has shown us is that.....start of RANT.....

getting funding for innovation projects in the UK is a complete nightmare - so much so that we have given up trying on our own as a small business. Catapult, runs is own consulting arm - why - I have no idea - seems a little conflicted to me - so now we won't bid because we've had ideas 're-cycled'. Also why on earth would you go to one of their events to brainstorm ideas for innovation. Well we went to one but that was it. Then there are other Innovate UK initiatives i.e. KTP - where's your business case and partners - and by the way can you fund 50% of the work. Its not as bad as that, I'm sure if we put enough bids in we would get something in the spray of money coming out. The issue here is the amount of time it takes to put a submission together - i.e. to fill out all the forms (while working full time on projects and making sure your business is still functioning). I'm sure its just a means of keeping box ticking checkers employed. May as well just fund 100% of the research yourself as you could have the work done in the time it takes to do all this - and keep the IPR.

.....end of RANT.

We did waste a lot of time and energy on these things. Suppose its fine if you are a large outfit with spare capacity to service the submissions but we don't have that luxury. better to just get on with development. So that's what we did.

We have been building upon out review of big data and its application in the railway sector in particular. These have included;

building a strategic relationship with AIT the Austrian Institute of Technology to resell their product range.
building partnerships on projects with Universities such as Lancaster and Manchester - both working out brilliantly for us.
setting up an office in Atlanta to build links with Georgia State University and to kickstart our US business.
developing an NLP tool for analysing risk logs - see a previous blog on this one - I got so excited I blogged - conference coming up in 2018 to present the results.
keynote speaking at events such as the IMechE annual conference - scary.

So, in all, 2017 has been a year of consolidation and positioning, we now need to push through on some of the product development ideas.....onwards and upwards in 2018.

Cheers.....Gary

Friday, 20 October 2017

Working it out in Logs

Long time no blog - but have been busy on top secret stuff. Here is a glimpse into some of the things I've been up to.

Railway safety management is a complex subject that involves a significant amount of manual intervention in the assessment, analysis and control of risk. Supporting documentation is, usually, worked on by multiple parties, with differences in system viewpoints and writing styles. Maintaining quality safety documentation is therefore an interesting challenge for the industry.

Hazard logs, for example, play a central role in both system engineering and risk assessment activity. The role of the log is to contain a representation of the risks related to the system under consideration. The content of the hazard log relies upon input from a variety of sources and collaborative activities involving teams with varying expertise and knowledge. From past experience we have found that the quality of this information can vary greatly both within and between projects. This is particularly so for larger projects where problems can arise when the amount of textual data that has to be processed increases. The volume and variety of the data and the need for collaboration creates the significant challenge of managing the content, keeping up the textual readability, format and consistency.

What we are currently working on is a tool that automatically assesses the ‘quality’ of a risk log. The intention is that the tool can be used to monitor the quality of a hazard log in ‘real’ time or at least at regular intervals during a project or for checking the output from critical risk workshop sessions. The tool uses Natural Language Processing and machine learning to assess the quality of a hazard log, based solely on the textual content in the log. The method includes text classification and term frequency-inversion to identify important keywords on different textual elements to represent quality indicators.

The intention is not to replace a human expert, but rather to support assessments by providing an early indication of the textual data in the log. This involves checking for signs of imprecise and unclear writing and identifying issues that may make it hard for readers to fully interpret accident sequences. The tool has been built around the CENELEC standards to aid compliance with both the standards and risk management best practice in general.

A preliminary study in collaboration with Lancaster University has been undertaken to prove the method. Results from this study have demonstrated the power of using textural analysis in this arena. We have identified a number of hazard log quality indicators and developed demonstrator software which performed well against a manual evaluation of a sample data set. In general, the tool can help the users by saving time and effort by helping in the review of entries in the log. It can also help clarify thinking around accident sequences by highlighting ambiguous or multi-content entries.

The results of this study will be presented at the Transport Research Arena conference in April 2018 in Vienna.