Current Research - EIS

Design optimization

Process / plant optimization

Modeling, simulation and control of plants, equipments and processes

Data Analysis and Data Mining

Design optimization

Solution for optimal design, cost, material selection and performance of assemblies / subsystems in industrial products. Today’s consumers demand innovative designs delivered with high quality fits and finishes. Designers demand the closest possible fits to provide the truest possible physical manifestation of their designs. However, inherent variations in manufacturing imply variations to the design. The optimization solutions developed by R&D focuses on this trade-off and suggest a robust & cost effective design of a product which is realizable at the manufacturing stage

Process / plant optimization

Solutions for optimal performance and usage of resources in a plant / process has been a trend in the industry to be tackled under the paradigm called operations research (OR). The lab focuses on operational optimization of equipments / plant / process in a hierarchical optimization problem formulation. Apart from supply chain planning and scheduling over strategic, tactical and operational time horizons, production scheduling, vehicle routing, dynamic workforce scheduling under uncertain conditions as well as various operational constraints for discrete as well as continuous process industries has been a key focus area for the lab. A bunch of indigenous direct and indirect optimization techniques along with various state-of-the-art commercial softwares are being used for the purpose.

Modeling, simulation and control of plants, equipments and processes

In many of the engineering and industrial systems, the current trend in the design and operation is to prove the concept in simulated environment (rapid prototyping)  before the  deployment.  The lab is engaged in developing following classes of models for various equipments and processes covering the domains of automotive, chemical and mineral processing.
First principle models
Deterministic/stochastic models
Data based models and soft sensors
The models are validated against real life data and scenarios.
The counterpart of the plant is a control system with control objectives. The lab has developed various advance control techniques for the systems modeled as linear as well as nonlinear and dynamic nature.

Data Analysis and Data Mining

The lab has a focus area around the development of data analysis and mining assets for manufacturing and process industry.
Data analysis is the process of looking at and summarizing data with the intent to extract useful information and develop conclusions. This also involves automating the visualization of the analyzed data with historic trends.
Data mining is the group of techniques for sorting through large amounts of data and extracting out the relevant information. It can also provide the user some insights that are not readily apparent through simple slicing and dicing of the data.