Innovative Projects Realized

Co-Ordination of Steel Production Operationsfor Increased Throughput

This project aims to improve the throughput of the production system at ArcelorMittal through better coordination between the production operations. The project proposes a sophisticated discrete-event simulation model to analyze the impact of all important parameters of the production system, such as steel temperature, furnace heat duration, ladle movements, and heat loss at ladle. Several improved coordination strategies will be generated and deployed in the simUlation model and the to-be behavior of the system will be observed. For each high-performance coordination strategy, sensitivity analyses will be done to validate the robustness. The results will provide ArcelorMittal managers with a better understating of the production system and individual significance of all its parameters to its performance. The proposed coordination practices will lead to significant cost savings and throughput improvements. The results of this project will also be used as a numerical basis for future investments and improvements to the system.

Dynamic multi-type multi-priority emergency surgery scheduling with accurate service duration estimation

The process of setting surgical schedules in a modern hospital operating room suite is complicated. Scheduling surgery involves coordinating two separate but inter-related service distribution channels, namely, elective surgery operations and emergency surgery operations. Elective surgical cases are selected from a broad range of diagnostic categories and are scheduled in advance into surgical time that usually runs during regular business hours. In contrast, emergency surgery, often referred to as “unscheduled” surgery randomly emerges from a much narrower range of higher urgency indications and is scheduled by allocation onto available operating room time-based on relative priority. The emergency surgery waitlist is particularly challenging to manage as the operating room manager must simultaneously consider multiple patients from multiple priority levels and balance available resources against many uncertainties including demand variability and surgery duration. There is an agreement in medical society that a delay in receiving emergency surgery care can result in adverse patient outcomes. Therefore, based on the urgency of the case, operations are categorized into several priority groups so that each group has its own wait time target within which surgeries should be scheduled.

Shear-induced coalescence for controlling emulsion stability

To reduce the negative impact on the environment and increase the competitiveness of Canada’s oil resources in the global economy it is essential to improve the ability to separate crude oil from water. This proposal aims to advance the understanding of a novel mechanism to do this by studying individual oil and water droplets. The intern will employ cutting edge characterization techniques and carry out proof-of-concept experiments that will enable new technologies for separating oil and water when processing crude oil as well as in other applications like food and cosmetics. BC Research will then be able to leverage the new technologies to create new intellectual property, increase business activities, and create new jobs in Canada.

Recherche de traceurs chimiques dans l’huile isolante permettant de déterminer indirectement la vie résiduelle des transformateurs de puissance

Un problème réel dans l’industrie des transformateurs de puissance est le manque d’outils et de méthodes précises pour déterminer l’état et la durée de vie de l’isolation principale. Ces appareils onéreux, composés d’enroulement de cuivre isolés par du papier et le tout baignant dans une huile isolante, représentent le coeur de tous réseaux électriques. Le but de ces stages est de déterminer des traceurs chimiques, capables de prédire le niveau de dégradation/vieillissement de l’isolation solide des transformateurs de puissance. Les opérateurs pourraient ainsi prendre des décisions appropriées afin d’éviter des pannes majeures. En effet, si l’on peut prévoir les pannes, il devient possible de les éviter! L’évaluation précise de l’état d’un transformateur permet de prévoir son remplacement au moment optimal.

Fabrication of multilayer antibacterial PHBV-based micro-nanofibre through the electrospinning technique

Due to the prevalence of coronavirus and the spread of Covid-19 disease, the use of masks has increased significantly, which due to the more disposable use of these masks, environmental hazards have increased significantly. Therefore, the production of high-performance masks in the field of antimicrobials is very important. In this project, we investigate suitable biodegradable polymers for the production of micro/nanomembranes suitable for the production of face masks through the electrospinning method that is environmentally friendly.

Developing m-health application framework

MedInstructional Resources Inc. focusses on providing turnkey solution for the education needs of the medical professions. Our current focus is on improving the reliability, agility, accountability and quality of medical student exams. The widespread adoption of mobile computing devices like tablets, offer the possibility to digitize the process of conducting student/patient exams in hospitals. MedInstructional Resources has identified as its goal to develop applications for mobile devices for use in situations where multiple examiners, multiple students and multiple stations are involved in order to make the administration of these events more efficient, cost-effective, secure, faster and reliable.
The partner organizations will be benefited from the results generated by this project. As we develop the system, we will take an iterative or agile approach where the development of system components is independent from each other. This will result into more flexible and more maintainable system.

Efficient Learning Methods for Multimodal Understanding

The main focus of this research is to develop representation learning architectures and algorithms that can help perform various multimodal understanding tasks, and at the same time reduce the need for human supervision in the form of costly annotations. To achieve this goal, a learning system must be able to: (1) learn new tasks or concepts with a few examples; (2) effectively use the knowledge already acquired by the system; (3) rely on one modality (e.g., text/audio) to fill in gaps in another modality (e.g., vision); and finally (4) retain high performance on all tasks/concepts learned previously. The goal of this research is to develop methods that enable efficient learning for multimodal tasks (e.g., dialogue-based image/video retrieval) in scenarios with limited annotated data. As part of this work, we will focus on answering two key questions: (1) How to leverage the problem structure in order to enable learning algorithms that use limited annotations more effectively? and (2) What are the mechanisms that enable efficient learning from few examples?

Advanced Text Clustering Algorithm for Aircraft Applications

CaseBank provides a service called ChronicX™ to the airline industry for the purpose of detecting and managing repeat defects, i.e. faults that have eluded resolution repeatedly. Each night, airlines upload their raw maintenance records to the CaseBank server. ChronicX applies text mining methods to eliminate irrelevant records, and search for defects that are repeat occurrences of defects previously reported. These are assembled into clusters, each of which is called a ‘chronic’. ChronicX performs reasonably well, but it has limitations that we believe can be improved.

Marketing

The pandemic negatively impacts most businesses and this will likely influence consumer behavior in the future. Habitat for Humanity aims to adapt to the new situation and increase their revenue by focusing on some business strategies. These strategy require comprehensive research in terms of the real estate industry, market environment, market share, etc. It is projected by using initiative strategies and targeting specific institutions, HFHMVI as a non-profit organization will be able to fund its projects and shelter more people.

La gestion du climat

La mission de Muclitech est de concevoir, produire et fournir des équipements de gestion du climat se démarquant par leur ingéniosité, leur adaptabilité et leur qualité, répondant en cela aux besoins et attentes d’une clientèle nationale et internationale à la recherche de solutions innovantes.

Principales activités de Muclitech
Accompagner le producteur agricole dans la conception de ses infrastructures de production en milieu clos.
Fournir et installer de l’équipement pour une salle de culture en milieu clos.
Accompagner le producteur dans la gestion de l’exploitation agricole sur le long terme.

Grâce à la participation de la stagiaire, Muclitech espère développer une opportunité d’affaires qui se développe au Québec et qui a pris encore plus d’ampleur depuis la pandémie de Covid-19. En effet, le secteur de la production de légumes et de fruits en milieu clos est présentement en expansion. La pandémie a créé un mouvement favorable pour l’achat local de ces denrées. Muclitech espère se tailler une place de choix dans ce secteur.

Développement de vaccins vivants atténués contre les infections causées par les Escherichia coli pathogènes aviaires

L’utilisation abusive et la mauvaise utilisation des antibiotiques chez les animaux et les humains contribuent à la menace croissante de l’émergence des souches résistantes aux antibiotiques. Certains types de bactéries qui causent des infections graves chez l’homme et l’animal y compris les poulets, les bovins et les porcs ont déjà développé une résistance à la plupart ou à tous les traitements disponibles, et il y a très peu d’options prometteuses. Le développement des approches alternatives à l’utilisation des antibiotiques en industrie avicole reste une priorité majeure afin de mettre fin à l’utilisation des antibiotiques. La vaccination des volailles à l’aide de vaccins vivants atténués contre la colibacillose devient de plus en plus nécessaire pour maintenir le bien-être des animaux et réduire la quantité et la fréquence d’utilisation d’antimicrobiens dans les fermes.

Middleware-Layer for Mobile Game Architecture

Mobile devices are well established at the heart of our digital lives. Today, these devices are utilized as personalized and enterprise application nodes. Moreover, mobile devices support ubiquitous access to data which even makes them a pivotal component in the deployment of applications such as online games. However, there are challenges that have plagued the mobile field. No matter the advances we make, mobile devices still rely on wireless channels to communicate, and these channels experience sporadic disconnections and bandwidth fluctuations. Hence, activities such as online gamification using the mobile as the consumer node experiences setbacks such as loss of data and poor data transmission. In this research, we aim to enhance the mobile gamer experience by proposing a middleware framework that facilitates real time communication exchanges including support for high user throughput.