Eurtooling21 project concluded.

The Eurotooling21 project has just come to the end. As part of our participation in this EC funded project, we developed the Quick Quotation Assistant (QiQA) tool. Noticeably, the QiQA was selected as one of the Top 10 results of this project that comprises 33 partners from ten EU member states. Detailed information on this tool can found at the QiQA's final technical report.

QiQA idea overview

While preparing the Quick Quotation Assistant (QiQA) final report, within my collaboration on Eurotooling21 project, I redesign from scratch the diagram that represents the idea behind this tool. Below you can find the new diagram, depicting the basic principles of the quotation assistance environment.

New version of QiQA prototype

After a few weeks of hard work, the core of the "Quick Quotation Assistant" (QiQA) prototype was redesigned from scratch. Although the interface remains unchanged (except for a minor detail on QiQA-Builder) the implementation of algorithms is now absolutely different. These are now independent from each other, whilst in the previous version all were implemented together,with several cross-dependencies and lots of unnecessary functionalities. The current version of the prototype and a small drawing collection are available at the QiQA software download page.

A long lasting bug was solved!

Since the beginning of the QiQA prototype development I have been battling with a weird problem. The application just ended unexpectedly while processing some drawings during database building. However, I never had the opportunity to study this problem properly. Instead I choose to skip the problematic drawings, flagging them as "nor processable".

Fortunately, thanks to recent improvements in the feature extraction algorithms, the drawing processing is much faster than before (at least ten times faster). Thus, I decided to focus on the above referred problem.

After identifying a drawing that triggers the above referred error, I patiently started to debug the code. After several boring hours of detailed analysis, I finally found the portion of the code that causes this damned error.

Code exit point.

It was during the access to a list within the CALI code, developed by Manuel João da Fonseca. When the given index value is outside the valid bounds, this library simply calls the C++ "exit" function. And that's it. But why and when does this happen? During the computation of convex hull of the "CIScribble".

The source of the problem

Indeed, it seems to be missing a test in the "while" sentence, which allows a variable with a unacceptably low value to be used as index to access a list. Therefore, for now the solution was just adding a test to the "while" test expression and voilá... it works fine.

QiQA Demonstration Video

Last week we created a short video to be shown in the "3as Jornadas de Inovação", an exposition organized by ADI. In this video we illustrate the main features of Quick Quotation Assistant (QiQA), a prototype developed within workpackage WP 5.1: Part and Tool Design of the Eurotooling 21 project.