IT Playground
When weather does not inspire me for outdoor activities, I enjoy diving into various IT topics to gain and maintain the knowledge I keep teaching in school. Basically, I'm fascinated and attracted by Open-Source IT software or standards like
- Linux
- Python, JS
- MySQL/MariaDB
- Arduino
Since my time in university, I've been fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Back then, we'd learned how to recognize handwritten digits. Today, I'm intrigued by the scientific achievements made available by AI frameworks like TensorFlow.
I suppose many software projects would better meet user needs if they were open source for three reasons:
- as a user, I have the freedom to customize and improve the software as I wish. This could actually encourage more people to learn programming.
- as a user or organization, I can check the source for malicious or unwanted parts (like trackers, spyware etc.)
- by buying or ordering only open source products, my organization has the freedom to adapt the software to meet actual needs.
Saying this, I am well aware that open source software does cost money (or at least a lot of time) to develop, test and distribute.
Notice: Schirmer Scientific Systems is now Green-ORCA :: Operations Research Computing and Analysis Schirmer
- Details
- Category: Research Projects
Scheduling hours and staff per crew are optimized with Genetic Algorithms to meet daily and hourly changing work demands in a 24/7 operation as displayed in the illustration below.
Goal is to reduce both Under- and Over staffing at any time during the week, and thereby improve both response times of the staff and overall performance. Further, schedules must meet legal and chronotypical requirements, that is schedules must contain appropriate rest phases and rotation patterns.
The next figure illustrates the optimisation of mis-scheduled working hours with GA during the optimization generations:
The resulting schedules are presented to the clients.
- Details
- Category: Research Projects
Many nowadays biofuel powerplants suffer inefficiency in several ways. The built-in electrical equipment is not commonly controlled by inverters but contactors. This results in both fast mechanical wearing of the mechanical components and power waste for full speed operation of the engines.
For a biofuel powerplant in Bavaria, possibilities to reduce both energy consumption and mechanical decay were analyzed. The suggested solution of implementing PLC driven and sensor controlled inverters for the electric ventilators, pumps and mixing equipment reduces the self power consumation from average 20kWh down to 10kWh per operating hour. For the estimated 200 annual operation days, savings of approximately 10T € can be achieved. With these savings, the initial costs for the inverters and sensors will be accumulated in approximately 1 year. In addition, mechanical wearing and maintenance downtime is greatly reduced.
Automatic fine-grain control of the input gas pressure for the generator is a crucial factor for the power generation and therefore for the productivity of the biofuel powerplant. With the implemented solution for the impeller, a steady input pressure is achieved.
The proposal was implemented and fine-tuned on-site.
For more information, please contact me.
Subcategories
Research Projects Article Count: 7
Since my studies, I am fascinated by simulation and computing algorithms inspired by nature. Be it ant colony optimization for fleet routing, be it genetic algorithms for optimizing high dimensional paramterization problems, with my research company Green-ORCA I can tackle it.
Web Design Article Count: 3
Back in 1996 I started learning HTML and CSS. The internet bandwidth was still so slow that one thought twice what size of pictures to upload, and interactivity was mainly achived with simple forms. Times have changed, and the once mainly static world wide web turned into a giant market place and communication platform.
Server-side technologies like PHP, ASP or Java plus browser-embedded JavaScript (JS) and CSS enabled platforms like Facebook or Amazon to deliver content dynamically, database-driven, on demand. The advent of AJAX greatly improved the browsing experience by avoiding page reloads and enabling true interactivity like search suggestions.
And here we are - JS-based server-side frameworks (like Meteor) with extensive code generators for client and server-side make full-stack development extremely productive, and perhaps sooner or later replace the classic server-side and client-side code mess.
However, for the time being this page is mainly a technical playground for me, based on Joomla and a few PHP and JS snippets of my own.