VORtech Blog

In our practice as scientific software engineers at VORtech, we work for organizations that have computational software as an essential part of their intellectual capital. If successful, a computational software package can exist for many years and even decades. At the same time however, the code base grows and becomes more and more difficult to manage. This is part 1 of a series of blogs in which we discuss how to deal with legacy code.

Digital twins are the hype of the moment in automation. But the concept is rather ambiguous: people refer to it in many different ways. To bring some order in this confusion, I tried to find a classification of digital twins. It turns out that a single classification is not enough.

At VORtech we mostly work on extending and improving existing code. Let us explain why this is so important and how it works. 

The FailurePredictor is a concept to make electricity grids more robust and reliable using a combination of expert experience and machine learning.

Digital twins are the hype of the day in industrial technology. Software companies are quick to jump on the band wagon, launching products that fulfil at least part of the functionality that is associated with digital twins. But where is the open source platform that allows collaboration on the development of this concept? The current open source initiatives don't seem to live up to the needs. An initiative on European level would be welcome.

Burn injuries can have a radical impact on someone’s quality of life. A burn injury in the neck, for example, can cause a contraction that makes it impossible for someone to lift his or her head. Complications such as hypertrophic scars and contractions can occur as the result of burn injuries. In the first-place, hypertrophic scars cause aesthetic problems. In the case of hypertrophy, the scar is thicker and more elevated than normal. The second class of complications, an excessive contraction, often causes reduced mobility of the joint of the patient.

In recent years, we were fortunate to work on many different data-science projects for our customers. But from experience I know that the most important success factor of such a pilot project is not in using the most advanced algorithm, but instead, how the project is designed.

Current advances in data science open up a lot of new opportunities to leverage data. Companies learn to leverage their data to improve business processes and products. When implementing new data science projects, unexpected problems may appear.

Simulation of the world around us by numerical computation has improved a lot in the past decades. Together with Johan Dijkzeul we will look back at this period.

The forty-second Woudschoten Conference was held at the Woudschoten Conference Centre, Zeist, The Netherlands from 4-6 October 2017.