Textile process energy modeling software - A Blast from the Past
Isn't the Internet great? Something happened the other day to remind me of my master's work 10 years ago. To my surpise the library at NC State has a pretty good online search and within a couple of clicks I was on my Thesis. Pretty exciting, to me at least.
That was a real fun project. I got to go into several textile plants, monitor their equipment running and them come back and do regression analysis on the results with the machine settings to produce predictive models for energy consumption for many of the textile processes, like weaving, ring and air jet spinning to name a few. Man that was fun!
Well I took the algorithms and produced some software that a plant manager or bean counter type could put the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) settings for a machine and it would produce approximately how much it costs to produce a pound or whatever unit of measurement of textile product. This was all part of what Total Quality Mangement calls Activity Based Costing.
Recently I have been thinking about this project and wondeering how can I apply this to software development. I knwo I can time myself creating application modules from the database table through to the basic User Interface hookups with the help of CodeSmith. But how to do you account for variations to the core model? Plus those inherant changes the customer calls and asks for 2 hours into developing the module that cause you to go back and rebuild just about everything you just did?
I am so jealous of my auto mechanic, for the most part he can look up a procedure in a mannual and it will tell him how many minutes of labor a job should take and he can give me a real good estimate on the price. After 6 years of being my own company, I have yet felt comfortable creating estimates for work. I think I know how long it should take to make the request workable in a productive manor, but the customer will always want something different. I think the more I use OnTime, it will help me get the analytics I need to make better descisions here.