What is Shiftbulk?

Shiftbulk is an experimental platform for the design and management of belt conveyor systems. It is designed to maintain a highly structured and flexible database that allows for change over time as well as a managed multi-user functionality.

Thank you very much for visiting Shiftbulk. We hope you are able to explore and view some of the functionality on your visit and hope to have you back. Should you have any questions or queries, please use the contact page, and we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible.

Shiftbulk has been designed to emulate the GitHub management platform, with the intention of allowing for the same level of social design. focusing on a user-centric structure that allows for users to create and join "organizations" that would allow for discretised control of workgroup permissions. This can be achieved by designing as an individual, or as an organization.

From the study of conveyor design and conveyor design systems, it can be seen that the topic is broad, and covered by many variations of "best practice". As a result of this, the industry is extremely well progressed from a technological perspective, and a large portion of the good work has been done historically. Due to this ageing of the industry, the bulk of the documentation on conveyor systems is scattered across various media, and very little of the information is managed in a structured fashion. As a result of this, conveyor systems ( Idlers, pulleys, belting ) are almost entirely defined by specifications.

As the internet has spawned a new era of collaborative platforms for data capture, from GitHub to Wikipedia, the engineering environment has missed the opportunity to step into the realm of a collaborative design vision. Shiftbulk hopes to take a stab at emulating the requirements for a collaborative design approach to belt conveyors. The idea is to fully map the entire design requirements for a "belt conveyor for loose materials handling". Shiftbulk aims to effectively generate the solution surface of the design of a conveyor system.

How is this achieved?

Shiftbulk adopts a node-based design to its data storage system. Effectively managed by 1 form, all data is linked in a parent-child relationship, and is used to create a tree-based hierarchy of data. This tree structure creates a relationship based database that is very flexible and can be used to achieve various data structures that can be dynamically modified to suit the required output.

The data structure is designed to retain all revision information, whereby no record is deleted, merely archived, allowing for a complete change history on each element of this database. The user, time date and changes are all recorded to allow any changes to be reviewed should the need arise. This allows for a completely traceable change history on all entries, whether administrator level, user level or items that are managed at an organizational level.

As each element is tracked by its own id, the chain of revision elements are tracked to each revision. This creates the need for a "commenting " system to be used to allow collaborative input to required changes on an element. This is managed by the issue tracking system. This can be dynamically managed by the users to create id linked or stand-alone issue groups, that can be commented on by various users, or the general public. This allows for fully managed and collaborative approach to design changes on sitewide data items, as well as organization level collaboration.

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