501 23rd International Colloquium Tribology - January 2022 501 From service request to standardized tribological data sets Alvaro Garcia TEKNIKER, Eibar, Spain Corresponding author: *alvaro.garcia@tekniker.es 1. Introduction Advances on technologies regarding acquisition, communication, storage and processing of data and information are providing a great impact on the way tribological experiments can be managed, and tribological results and data can be integrated and enriched with new services. This paper will introduce one of the advances made in this direction within the i-TRIBOMAT project, with respect to tribology tests and data management. It will describe all the defined data entities used to cover tribological data. It will also introduce the tools and infrastructure developed to manage the data sets. 2. Aim The approach of the i-TRIBOMAT project is to create a portal where a group of tribological labs collaborate to offer their services in a single portal. This way clients are given access to a shared pool of equipment, making it possible to offer a greater range of services in the same endpoint. To achieve this a well-defined data management system is necessary. Each tribology lab partner has an internal way of describing, naming, identifying, and storing tribological tests and their results. A common and harmonized data management system is thus necessary to make data coming from all partners shareable and integrable. An extensive data model is the cornerstone of this, along with software components to manage and exploit it. 3. Data model The data model includes all the necessary entities to describe the different elements involved in tribological testing. These entities are the following: - Equipment: Defines any equipment capable of being used in a tribological tests. It includes some basic information about itself (name, description, ... ) a list of configurable traits and a list of expected results or data signals. - Materials: This entity defines any material used in the samples, including core materials and coatings. Is defined by attributes such as identifiers, designations, chemical composition and physical properties. - Samples: Define any sample, body or interbody involved in a tribological test. It includes a list of characteristics (shape, size, materials/ composition, coatings/ additives...). - Tribological tests: A tribological test includes basic information (name, description...) and references to involved equipment and samples. It is composed by a series of steps, which will have the specific configuration values for the involved equipment. An attribute will keep track of the status of the test and their inner steps: Requested, In progress, Completed... - Results: A completed test step will have associated results which can be multivalued functional data, single annotations and associated files or images. Figure 1: Major data model entities Some of these entities have sub-entities (e.g. samples have batches and coatings), but the five introduced are the major ones. 3.1 Variable types and key-value pairs The variable-types is a predefined list of any measurable or configurable attribute, which will be referenced in all the other entities. They include a unique identifier, descriptive name, magnitude and measuring unit. The reason to have the list is to avoid possible misnomers and conflicts between similar names. All of the entities are based on lists or sets of variable type-value pairs (equipment characteristics, sample attributes, test conditions, test results...). This approach makes it possible to modify the entities as it is needed, while new variable types can be added to extend the model to new use cases. 502 23rd International Colloquium Tribology - January 2022 From service request to standardized tribological data sets The values can include references to external entities, making it possible to create relationships with external entities. E.g: The tool uses a software called KeyCloak to manage users and roles. There exists an attribute to reference operators performing the test, which could take the value of users defined in KeyCloak. 3.2 Additional data entities The presented entities focus on the technical aspect of the tribological service, those aimed at the definition and characterization of tribological tests. But a tribological service also includes other business-related data entities: requests, orders, contacts, clients, invoices, reports… While a specific software has been developed to manage the technical data entities, existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are used to manage the business aspect of the services. 4. Extracting information from a service request Prior to the service request the partners will have a list of their existing equipment, which will have a range of operations and configurations. Once the service request arrives tribological experts will assess the petition. If the proposed outcome is to perform a tribological test , the following will be defined: - The materials to be used in the samples. Novel materials will be added to the data set, defining the composition and known characteristics. - Samples to be used, with references to their materials, physical characteristics, coatings and any other trait. - Type of test to be performed, along with the desired configurations: movement type, loads, environmental conditions... More than one test can be defined per service request. Once defined, the software tool will look for available equipment that can perform the request test(s). The partner owner of the equipment will receive the description of the test to perform. Once the tribological test is performed the results will be uploaded. The collected data can be used to provide additional services. The results can provide insight into how different materials behave in similar conditions, or how the same material performs in different conditions and configurations. More available data can reduce the need to perform tribological tests, using previous ones as reference instead. 5. Software components The data management system is composed of two software tools. The first tool is the triboconector. It will act as a local management system for the different partner labs. It will relay the requested services and tests to perform and keep track of their status, as well as collect and upload their result data. This tool is designed in a modular manner making it possible to add new characteristics, such as the analysis of topographical images or search for scientific articles from federated databases The second tool is a centralized data platform. It will be used as an entry point for customers to request services, as well as a central data repository. Most of the “business” related functionalities will take place on the data platform, while the triboconector will be more “technical” related. 6. Conclusions The introduced data model allows for a detailed description of all the involved information needed when defining a tribological service. This has several benefits: - The harmonized information allows different partners to perform the requested test without the risk of missing details out or mixing conditions due to misnomers, translation errors or difference in namings. - The data collected from different partners can be integrated and exploited for additional service value. The i-TRIBOMAT project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (innovation action) under grant agreement No. 814494 (Call: H2020-NMBP-TO-IND-2018)