University of Dubai students research WSNs to improve bottom line

A team of four undergraduate students from the College of Information Technology (CIT) at the University of Dubai (UD) recently began researching wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to discover ways the technology could improve efficiency of a local printing company.

Working in UD’s WSN Research Lab, a result of an IBM Academic Initiative Program, CIT students Qaiser Hamed, Abdullah Mohammed, Susan Mohammed and Ammar Al Taweel are conducting this applied research through CIT’s capstone course – a course in which students develop an idea that will benefit a company, outline a plan of action and create a computer application to help carry it out.

The team is working with a leading printing company that specializes in the design and printing of continuous computer forms, labels and flexible packaging. The machine, paper and ink are all affected by factors such as temperature and humidity and must be monitored constantly. Any damage to the printing machine or the paper rolls it uses can cost the company thousands of dirhams in repairs and production down-time.

The students plan is to monitor the paper printing and warehouse environments, provide accurate live reports and initiate an early-warning via SMS to proactively reduce the production down-time. Eventually the information received from the WSN can be analyzed and integrated into automated systems.

“The large paper rolls our project’s sponsor works with, are susceptible to humidity and temperature,” Abdullah said, “when the sensor reads temperature and humidity measurements that are above or below some user-provisioned thresholds, our application will send out a warning SMS message to the designated maintenance manager.” The company is considering buying an expensive control room to maintain the printers but Abdullah hopes his team can offer an inexpensive yet effective alternative.

Dr. Sami Miniaoui, a CIT Assistant Professor at UD, said the WSN Research Lab uses the IBM “Mote Runners” software development kit, which provides an open and programmer-friendly platform to develop applications in Java and C++, using Eclipse platform. The hardware is based on the Crossbow wireless sensor motes, he said. Dr. Miniaoui said that the Capstone students are working very hard to create an application that can not only prevent loss of production time or technical issues in the machine, but also generate analytical data to understand the condition that brings about such issues so they can be preemptively dealt with.