Proceedings of the 6th CIRP-Sponsored International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology

Process planning is a bridge between product designing and product manufacturing, feature is the basic definition of components for design or manufacturing. This paper presents a rapid process planning system dependent on the parametric machine features of parts. Firstly, a new knowledge expression based on the Parametric Procedure Charts (PPC) is adopted to express the features, PPC is a visual direction chart that presents the contents and the structure of the knowledge simulating the human beings thinking, which combines predication logic, semantic network and flow chart technology. Then PPC template is pre-created for each part family. To plan the process of a new part, the system extracts machine features from 3D part model via 3D CAD system’s APIs or general 3D model conversion interfaces, searches the proper PPC that feature belongs to according to the unique name, and evaluates parameters of the PPC based on the new feature’s dimensions or technological information, then explains and reasons procedure by solving various constraints defined by chart units of PPC. Finally, sequences the features process by appropriate principles, and outputs the process plan sheets. A software system name Para-KMCAPP is developed on KMCAPP platform, which has been successfully applied in some equipment enterprises for rapid process panning for some part family.

The Fabrication of aircraft structural parts is the bottleneck for manufacturing the modern aircrafts due to their structure complexity and technical difficulty. In order to improve the capability to fabricate the complicated aircraft structural parts and the efficiency of technical preparation, and also to accumulate and share the domain knowledge of manufacturing process, and reuse the 3D product model in the procedure of manufacturing, this paper introduced a kind of 3D-model-based integrated CAPP system by using digital and intelligent manufacturing technology, with which some problems above can be solved when manufacturing aircraft structural part. Some key technologies related to 3DCAPP system, such as the modelling technology of 3D manufacturing feature, the feature-based typical processing template, the procedure of knowledge-based process decision-making and visual manufacturing process on-machine application and so on, are introduced in this paper in details.

This paper presents an assembly path planning method based on lightweight model. Firstly, the position-posture matrix (PPM) of initial disassembly is calculated through identifying the features with assembly constraints in the lightweight model of part. Secondly, the bounding box and triangle meshes are projected to implement the collision detection at key point in the disassembly process. Then recording all key points produces the disassembly path. At last, the collision-free assembly path is generated by reversing the disassembly path. The instance application shows that this method can decrease technical requirements and application costs, improve calculation efficiency for the virtual assembly process planning, and is convenient for publishing to the work site of manufacturing and maintenance.

Extremely variable customer demands and increasing competition require a fast and efficient product development. Especially the industry for machining parts is forced to give an accurate estimation of costs and delivery time, besides forecasting the feasibility to gain a lead over competitors. STEP provides specialized application protocols (AP) for the integration of application systems from different fields of product development. In our long term research we are going to generate manufacturing variants using genetic algorithms under respect of a virtual factory environment. Therefore we require an application protocol specific interface for the integration of the STEP exchange structure from a physical file into the logical software layer. This paper gives an overview of our model that is fundamental for optimized product development and presents an approach for generating programming language dependent source code from the formal modeling specification language EXPRESS using the example of AP 224 and C#-.NET.

Precise machining spiral bevel gear (SBGs) on Numerical Control (NC) machine tools has attracted much research attention. This paper presents a new precise SBGs CAD/CAM model with Loop subdivision algorithm. The involute surfaces for spiral bevel gears and pinions are first modelled with parametric surfaces. From them and a set of parameters, an initial mesh model is created for gear surfaces. This mesh model is then used as a base for a subdivision surface. The precision of subdivision surfaces can be exactly controlled by a subdivision process which can generate enough machining points on the designed tooth surface model. As a result, all meshing points of the tooth surface for a pair of gear and pinion can be applied on NC machines for higher-precision surface manufacturing. This novel SBGs CAD/CAM modelling method has been evaluated with precision. The precise model could be extended to hypoid gear and other complex surface design.

To meet the challenges of designing mechatronic products, a program called MIDCAD was implemented which combines the functionality of Electronic Computer Aided Design (ECAD) and Mechanic CAD (MCAD) systems. Especially three-dimensional Molded Interconnect Devices (MID) and the layout of the electrical circuitry on their spatial surfaces are supported. In addition to MIDCAD there is a new research project working out the integration of macro-MID technology in automobiles (IMTP). On the one hand, the MCAD system CATIA V5 was enhanced by a computation of electrical properties of electric circuits and an automatic generation of the 3D electric conductor layout. The second part accomplishes the preparation of product information in CAD for automated production processes (CAM). This CAD-CAM-chain for a new technology called Flamecon® was developed in cooperation with LEONI AG, Germany. Furthermore, a technology database for MIDs was integrated plus a universal data format for geometry and extended information was implemented.

Due to rapidly development of technology and strictly competition in the context of global and concurrent economy, the requirements of customers such as quality, reliability, sustainability and cost of products are more and more high and tightened. Thus satisfaction of those is an important key of product designers. However, the product designers work principally on the nominal model of the product or virtual manufacturing within a CAD/CAM system. These models can only represent the nominal information of product and have not ability to deal with various kinds of deviations, especially geometric deviations generated and accumulated throughout the product life cycle stage by material defects, manufacturing errors, assembling inaccuracy, etc. These deviations can make the designed product not to meet fully and systematically the requirements of the customers and the users. Thus, it is necessary to take the geometric deviations into account the “real” performance simulation. In this paper, we propose geometric deviation modelling suitable for all stages of the product life cycle, especially manufacturing and assembly stages and a method to integrate the geometric deviations of the product into the “real” performance simulation. As a result, the product designers can generate the performance of the population of “real” products. They can thus verify that the product they are designing would have “real” performances satisfying or dissatisfying the requirements of customers and users.

With the advances in material engineering and the Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology, product design and realization are experiencing dramatic paradigm shifts. The new trend is that designers work with material scientists more cooperatively to tailor material compositions/structures to achieve desirable properties and to exhibit better performance than those products using other available materials. In this paper, research on heterogeneous (HE) material-based product modeling is reported. To better represent various HE material-based product models, a set of NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Spline) and HE material-based design features have been developed. The features are not only suitable for regular shapes, but also extensible for non-regular and complex shapes. Algorithms for linear and non-linear transition between HE materials have been embedded in the features to enable users to address the functional needs. Another characteristic of the features is that geometrical variables have been used to model HE materials to improve their computation and processing efficiency in RP. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the research for complex products, a case study to develop a HE material-based bone implant is reported to explain the modeling process.

Multi-material products are getting increasingly popular in recent years. Yet no systems have been developed to support the design of such products. In this paper, a haptic-based method for designing multi-material products is proposed. The proposed method consists of three main parts: haptic painting/marking, boundary smoothing/fitting, and volume decomposition. A prototype system based on the three parts has been implemented using a haptic input device. The haptic device provides an intuitive user interface for quick volume mark up in a multi-material product by direct mesh painting. Each painted region represents a material volume whose boundary can be automatically traced and smoothed. Based on the boundaries of painted regions, volume decomposition can be done automatically when needed. Each decomposed volume can be assigned a different material or color. The numerous iterations of volume mark up and decomposition in the early stage of multi-material product design can now be made easy and effective with the proposed method.

Environmental issues have become an imperative for most modern companies. They are under pressure on making the product development process compliant with recent green directives. Product structure is recognized as a critical factor for reducing environmental impact in product end-of-life. However, most previous studies failed to leverage the latitude at the design stage due to the assumption of a fixed product structure. We propose a CAD-supported tool that allows automatic variation of 3D product structure by combination of parts, selection of assembly method, and re-arranging the assembly sequence. A GA-based optimization scheme is developed to produce a better product structure corresponding to lower assembly/disassembly costs, while fulfilling with given recycling and recovering constraints. The results implemented in a commercial CAD system demonstrate the practicality of this work in computer-aided green product design.

The paper builds the whole vehicle dynamical model using ADAMS/Car software, and the Hydraulic System and ABS fuzzy control model are built using MATLAB/Simulink, both of the above construct the co-simulation model. under the initial vehicle velocities in 60km/h and on high adhesion coefficient roads using fuzzy control algorithm are analyzed. Fuzzy control algorithm can get better effects as the results of simulation test shows, which have reference to develop the practical electronic Control unit based on fuzzy control algorithm.

In this paper the realization method of collaborative CAD is introduced, How to synchronize model is one of the key technologies of achieving collaboration CAD. The incremental transmission algorithm of accurate CAD model based on changed primitives is presented for replicated collaborative CAD system in this paper, which reduces greatly amount of model data transmission during the process of collaborative CAD. This algorithm effectively achieves rapid transmission of the CAD model in synchronized collaborative design, and guarantees the synchronization of collaborative model.

This paper describes a methodology for the design and development of a knowledge management (KM) system for manufacturing enterprises based on enterprise architecture methodologies with real industrial case studies. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAF) have been proposed and developed to help enterprises design their information systems based on corporate objectives and user requirements. However, these frameworks have not given sufficient consideration of how to manage enterprise knowledge with the strong needs for better managing knowledge in the new product development process. This project aims to extend the newly developed enterprise architecture frameworks so that not only information, but also enterprise knowledge can be managed. This project focuses on the new product development process, and thus the enterprise in this context is defined as the product development enterprise or organisation. This paper describes the proposed methodology with an industrial investigation including the collaborating company’s business process, organizational structure and knowledge user requirements.

Reverse engineering has been a common method to glean the design experience and knowledge attached to the existing product. Up to date, most reverse engineers are focusing their work on the geometric reverse engineering; such reverse way cannot obtain the original intrinsic knowledge which actually is located in the function model of the existing product. In this paper, functional reverse engineering is proposed to gain the design intent of the existing product though two folds: (1) A form-to-function mapping framework is presented to figure out the function structure of the existing product; (2) A re-creation design method is given through function operations of the original function model. A case study is offered to illustrate the basic principles of functional reverse engineering.

In the current business environment, enterprises should be able to develop new products in a reasonably short period of time to satisfy customers’ demand as well as short product lifecycle. Furthermore, new product development is realized not only on an intra-enterprise level but also on an inter-enterprise level. Individual enterprises, especially small and medium enterprises, often do not have all the necessary skills and resources to develop new products. Therefore, finding the right and trustworthy partners and forming an organization for product development are important issues in developing new products. To find right partners and form an effective organization, it is necessary to measure trust values of other enterprises involved in product developments. The objective of this paper is to formulate a reference organizational architecture for product developments referred to as FrPDO (Fractal-based Product Development Organization model). A goal-oriented trust model and trust evaluation mechanisms for organizational formation are also developed. The fractal organization formation process is demonstrated for a new service robot development.

Product quality lies in the eye of the beholder. It is an individual and subjective interpretation of realized product criteria and hence more than the compliance with the customer’s expressed performance requirements. But the elicitation of delighting quality attributes is both time- and cost-intensive and often still open to interpretation. To successfully differentiate themselves from their competitors, companies have to systematically objectify their customers’ quality judgments. The paper presents an integrated approach to structure quality perception from the customer’s perspective and to channel the relevant information into the product development process. Key elements are the coordinated survey and specification of perception-relevant product attributes to minimize losses and misinterpretations. This supports the change from an intuitive to a fact-based product development as well as the notion of a resource-conserving value chain.

Product quality planning is a fundamental part of quality assurance in manufacturing. It is composed of the distribution of quality aims over each phase in product development and the deployment of quality operations and resources to accomplish these aims. This paper proposes a quality planning methodology based on risk assessment and the planning tasks of product development are translated into evaluation of risk priorities. Firstly, a comprehensive model for quality planning is developed to address the deficiencies of traditional quality function deployment (QFD) based quality planning. Secondly, a novel failure knowledge base (FKB) based method is discussed. Then a mathematical method and algorithm of risk assessment is presented for target decomposition, measure selection, and sequence optimization. Finally, the proposed methodology has been implemented in a web based prototype software system, QQ-Planning, to solve the problem of quality planning regarding the distribution of quality targets and the deployment of quality resources, in such a way that the product requirements are satisfied and the enterprise resources are highly utilized.

Case-Based Reasoning is an important method for the reuse of engineering knowledge. A study has been carried out by the authors on the key technologies that are needed in a Case-Based knowledge system to support engineering design. This paper reports a uniform dynamic representation mechanism based on granularity to represent the engineering knowledge, in the form of cases and rules, for the design of fixtures on machine tools. Based on the Nearest-Neighbour algorithm, an algorithm of case retrieval is brought forth to support the dynamic adaptation of index words and to optimize case retrieval by some design rules. It has been identified that case adaptation is one of the most difficult issues of Case-Based Reasoning for fixture design. Design rules have been used to improve the automation and quality of case adaptation. According to the characteristics of fixtures in the CAD data, several mining patterns can be provided, including case cluster analysis, design rules mining, CAD data criterion mining and user application pattern mining. Then an application platform for mechanical CAD data mining based on cases is built, and a feasible way has come up with to settle the problem of design knowledge acquisition. Based on the developed key technologies, a Case-Based knowledge system for fixture design has been developed and has been tested and applied in an aviation corporation.

To solve the implementation problems of knowledge management when a product is designed in Reverse Engineering (RE) integrated system developed by Multi-Agent, knowledge representation analysis involved in the process of reverse design is firstly analyzed. The tree architecture of knowledge is built. Three kinds of knowledge including domain and cooperation and meta-level are categorized according to analysis. The function process of knowledge management is then classified into three stages including collection, organization and application. By coordinating relationships among knowledge, data, process and tool, a comprehensive decision support system is finally constructed based on knowledge integration. The system possesses characteristics of cooperation and intelligence; it can support the distributed integration development environment in reversely designing process.

New products often evolve from past and existing products. This evolution largely defines the enterprise competitiveness in terms of the speed, quality and cost. Those design features that have proven successful or “fit” will survive and therefore be inherited by the new products, forming what is usually called a product “platform” and in turn providing a basis for mass customization (MC). This approach to new product development is generally termed as “Platform Product Development”. Whether or not an enterprise is able to capitalize on the concept of product platforms is vital to its business survival and growth. Whilst the approach has been widely appreciated and practiced with success in several industrial sectors, its industrial practice has remained as an art, heavily dependent on the experience and skills of individual designers and managers. Researchers and management consultants have been working on platform leveraging strategies at the strategic level, and guidelines for better structuring the approach to facilitate its adoption and implementation. This research project recognizes an equal need for scientific decision supports at the tactical level for design practitioners and managers to address fundamental questions such as (A) how a platform should be established for a family of products in a given industrial and market context, and (B) how a product development team chooses and then customizes the most appropriate product platform to meet the customer requirements from a specific market segment with particular manufacturing resources and supply bases. This paper is to describe a scientific and effective decision - Genetic Algorithm to assist product development practitioners and managers with major decision activities in the process of platform product development under several focus areas.

Production-oriented product validation methods aim at validation production requirements during the product design phase and to ensure that the product specification is in line with these requirements before launching further steps. This work describes the information models needed in order to represent the required information in digital form. The solution developed within the EU project MyCar, in collaboration between the IMI institute of Karlsruhe and the Research and Advanced Technology Group of Daimler AG, is based on an example of the body shop in the automotive industry. A solution based on the Production-oriented Product Validation Platform gathers the relevant production requirements and makes it available in a structured form to assess the product design with respect to its ability to be produced on the production equipment.

Reuse, remanufacturing and recycling have been recognized as the main preferred product end-of-life strategies in terms of sustainability currently. Those three end-of-life strategies require distinct processes, expertises and management respectively during product end-of-life phase. Therefore, it is imperative to achieve each end-of-life strategy separately and efficiently to achieve sustainability. Nowadays, products are characterized by high variety of constituent components with diverse appropriate end-of-life strategies. Ideally, if components with the same end-of-life strategy can be grouped in the same module, the overall sustainability of the entire product can be significantly enhanced by means of efficient and appropriate handling of end-of-life products. Moreover, all efforts should be concentrated on product design phase. To this end, this paper intends to propose a systematic approach assisting product designers during product design phase to facilitate and promote appropriate reuse, remanufacturing and recycling of the entire end-of-life product holistically to achieve sustainability.

This study aims to develop the instrument products collaborative design system, in terms of fully integrating collaborative tools and sharing of information and resources between designers. The life-cycle Market-Driven Virtual Prototype Design System (MD-VPDS) of instrument products is put forward in this paper. In order to achieve collaborative design, a distributed collaborative design system that merges web and multi-agent technologies is proposed and implemented in MD-VPDS. Meanwhile, the function of all MD-VPDS sub-systems is introduced. The software frame of the system is set up based on the idea of Virtual Prototype Design (VPD) and Computer Supported Collaborative Design (CSCD). The model and work principle of multi-agent are discussed in detail and applied in instrument product collaborative design system. MD-VPDS avhieves CSCD of instrument products based on the integrated development environment of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Dawning 4000A cluster etc. It has greatly improved the efficiency of product design.

Modeling of design processes is one of key issues of the management of complex product development because of its role in sustaining efficient and optimal execution of the design processes. This paper proposes a new methodology for modeling of design processes. The methodology includes two steps. The first step is to use an extended activity flowchart to perform predefinition of the design process. The second step is to transform the flowchart into an AND/OR tree structure. Based on the modeling, a new depth-first-search-based algorithm is presented for traversing the AND/OR tree structure, and performing real-time control of the design process. A special design process modeling and controlling tool is developed, and through running an example with the tool, the methodology is illustrated.

Micro manufacture is the production of products whose functional features or at least one dimension are in the order of (m. The production of micro products differs from the production for conventional products in many ways, not only the size of the products, but also the issues concerning the material properties, tooling, equipment and handling. These differences drive the need for a new design methodology and associated design tools to aid designers to assess their micro product design. This paper describes the development of a Web-Based Collaborative Design Tool (WBCDT) for assessing product design for micro-manufacturing in Masmicro project. The WBCDT supports the knowledge intensive collaboration among the micro-product designers and the discrete organizations through Internet. In the WBCDT, a knowledge model with the classified assessment modules and knowledge representatives is created to implement the distributed design and manufacturing assessment. The modules address the assessment on the following issues: geometry features relating to manufacturability, manufacturing process, availability and selection of tool and machine, material and manufacturing cost. The Microsoft C# programming language, ASP.NET web technology and Microsoft Access database are used to develop the WBCDT. Users can access the User Interface (UI) of the WBCDT in a specified service server to assess and optimise their product design. Users can also access the knowledge base and Knowledge-Based Decision System (KBDS) which are integrated into the WBCDT. The WBCDT prototype system has been tested with assessment of the micro-products for micro-forming which shows increase of design efficiency in knowledge intensive, web-based collaborative design environment.

This paper proposes a novel methodology of distributed PLM platform deployment. It efficiently incorporates PLM technologies to support collaborative product development in a global enterprise with multiple distributed sites. The methodology systematically analyzes a company’s PLM requirements from the

Organizational

,

Application

, and

Data

perspectives. A customized network configuration plan can then be developed for the company to build up a performance-oriented, cost-effective, and easy-to-maintain collaborative PLM platform. A case study is conducted to verify the feasibility of our method. The promising result of the case study gives rise to the potential and possibility to derive further research based on this work.

Traditionally, cost estimation methods are used to predict costs only after a product model has been built, and not at an early design stage when there is little data and information available. The traditional cost models and systems used require a large amount of detailed data before a cost calculation can be made. This research has identified that, one of the main challenges to improve this situation in modelling cost is data identification and collection. The aim of this paper therefore is to discuss the methods of developing an extended-enterprise digital data library, data searching and data transfer mechanisms to support through-life cost estimation in the innovative product development processes. The paper begins with an introduction of relevant research in data modelling in cost estimation. This is followed by a section, which highlights problems of performing cost estimates for innovative low volume products, and subsequently the proposed solutions and example applications.

This paper deals with customers’ requirements information based on fuzzy set theory, constructs fuzzy judgment matrix between customers’ requirements and technical performance of products, and determines product technical performance weighting through fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. At the same time, it constructs the market competitiveness evaluation matrix, uses entropy method to analysis the market competitiveness weighting, and determines the indexes weighting of market competitiveness. Directing at the risk of product innovation, this paper constructs the risk evaluation model and calculates the weighting of product innovation risk. Finally, combining with the weightings of product technical performance, market competitiveness, product innovation risk and customers’ requirements of subjective decision, the final importance ratings of customers’ requirements will be determined by the evaluation model with multiple weighting vector structure. And a case of comprehensive evaluation method of the importance ratings of customers’ requirements about the innovative design of numerical control machine is provided to verify the accuracy and feasibility of this evaluation method.

Process parameters optimal deployment should be founded on a utility and efficient process model, so modelling the product development process (PDP) is the first problem to solve in researching and optimizing PDP. As a support tool, this paper put forward a ProA (Activity and its process)-based PDP modelling method. It organizes the PDP information and knowledge by base unit ProA. Through decomposing ProA and ProA connection layer by layer, time, quality, cost, service and management targets of PDP are deployed into ProA attributes in various layers, which helps describe PDP and process information systematically from multi-angle of view. Based upon ProA model, a complete PDP parameters integrated optimization method is proposed and detailed workflow is designed. Using Quality Function Deployment for reference to deploy PDP layer by layer from top to bottom, with ProA as basic unit, this method emphasizes process parameters deployment as decomposing and constructing whole PDP, meanwhile a set of optimal evaluation indicator system should be established. Following ideas and work program of PDCA circle, workflow of process parameters deployment and optimal evaluation indicator system construction are discussed.

This paper presents an exploratory model of the NPD process, a cross-functional NPD team and NPD performance. The construct of the NPD process includes eight items, whilst that of the NPD team includes five. The NPD performance construct is represented by three variables: commitment to new product quality, acceleration of new product launch, and achievement of company objectives. Our findings give decision makers and senior management evidence that will allow them to concentrate on more significant areas of NPD improvement in future. First, we find that the NPD team is a more important factor in the success or otherwise of NPD than the NPD process, and that effective communication and technical competence/talent are the two most important elements of the NPD team. Second, we find that the NPD process and NPD team do not jointly contribute to NPD performance. Third, while the NPD team has a positive impact on the NPD process, it has an insignificant impact on NPD performance.

Inappropriate cutting force often causes tool failures, poor surface quality, and even machine breakdowns. It can be overcome by optimizing some cutting parameters, in particular, feed-rate. To optimize feed-rate, we propose a system which consists of three tasks: Optimization task, Process control task and Knowledge Based Evaluation (KBE) task. STEP-NC data model is used to perform the tasks. Given the nominal powers, the cutting force can be estimated based on the higher-level production information such as material work-piece properties, tool materials and geometries, and machine capabilities. The information together with the STEP-NC data model enables us to optimize the feed-rate via Optimization task, where EXPRESS language is used for constructing the data model. The actual feed-rate is attained by verifying the optimized feed-rate under actual cutting force condition based on the Process control task at shop-floor. Finally, the actual feed-rate is recorded and evaluated in the KBE task.

Given an efficient process, five-axis milling is a productive technology that can help production industries in countries with a high level of workers’ wages to remain competitive on the global market. For planning the required machining processes, engineers have to be supported by methods and tools. In current research at WZL of RWTH Aachen and IPT of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, a CAx framework for simulation-based planning of complex machining processes is developed. This software tool, embedded in a CAM system, bases on coupled models of numerical controllers, machine tools, control loops and cutting processes. For supporting an iterative optimization without long computational times, the optimization concept focuses on the identification of critical areas in NC programs regarding effects of different domains (e.g. control, machine, and process). These effects can be determined by applying a sensitivity analysis in combination with tracing tools, as it is exemplarily presented for NC effects.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology of the future that uses radio waves in order to identify objects. It can be considered to be part of an emerging universal infrastructure that supports greater visibility (e.g. object localization) and efficiency (e.g. reduction of manual input) in manufacturing processes. Increased requirements regarding efficiency in the metal cutting manufacturing urge to well matched tools. In combination with tools, RFID can lead to benefits such as optimal tool utilization, through put time reduction and efficient use of resources. This paper presents an approach to identify RFID application potentials for metal cutting tools in manufacturing processes. Hereby, it describes a step by step approach to define application potentials for RFID by taking technical restrictions into account. The paper presents significant results of identified potential to optimize manufacturing processes by the use of unified, comprehensive information.

This paper presents an evaluation method for part manufacturability. The data model used is the STEP-NC data model, i.e. ISO 14649. Firstly, the evaluation indices such as workpiece clamping, performance of machine tools, resources of cutting tools and auxiliary performances are presented. Then, an information resource model of machine tools is established, and an evaluation algorithm is designed. Finally, a prototype system is discussed which verified the model and algorithm developed.

The numbers of hard disk drive heads manufactured in Thailand have increased rapidly in the past few years, and one of the most important components of the hard disk drive head is the hard disk drive arm. This component has been produced in large amounts and has been a major income source for a case study company. The manufacturing process of the hard disk drive arm, especially the machining process, is highly complicated and also a main factor of defining the usability of the final product. However, during dimension inspections, many defected parts were detected, resulting in an overall decrease in productivity, sales and profit. Normally, parts are randomly chosen from each CNC machine to be inspected. If there is a defective product, that machine would be shut down and the tool settings will be reset. If the machine that has been producing defective products is inspected late into the inspection shifts, it would result in a considerable amount of defective parts produced before any corrective actions can be made. Therefore, this study presents an application of the integration between Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) and Data Mining (DM) to define the inspection order for tooling adjustment of which the machines with higher risk of producing defective parts can be inspected and corrected before those with lower risk. The methodology is as follows. First, raw measurement data from each machine was collected and noise elimination was performed using the anomaly clustering method. Secondly, K-means clustering, after a machine performance hypothesis test to confirm that the performance of each machine is not equal, was opted for dividing the raw data into three clusters, consisting of good, normal, and bad machines. Finally, a daily CNC machine priority assessment model (CNC-MPAM) is developed based on the Simple Additive Weight (SAW) technique, resulting in a machine performance score for optimal ordering of machine tooling adjustment. Experimental results suggested that this proposed method is capable of machine adjustment ordering so that defective prone machines can be serviced sooner, reducing defective parts produced and improving overall productivity.

Due to the complexity of freeform surface machining, multi-axes machine tools are widely used to increase the precision of surface machining. There are needs for the user, designer and manufacturer of machine tool constructing the multi-axis machine tools with various configurations by the virtual reality technique. The damage of multi-axis machine tool due to collision can be prevented by virtual machine tool simulation. The machining information, such as the machining time, machining accuracy and the NC codes that cause collisions, can be obtained before actual machining. Most of the previous research of postprocessor concentrated on the orthogonal and single configurations. This paper aims at developing an automated universal postprocessor for both orthogonal and non-orthogonal configurations. The configuration information of machine tools and modified D-H notation is employed to develop the postprocessor of multi-axes machine tools. The user interface of the system has been implemented and displayed by OpenGL. A case study is given to demonstrate the construction procedure of virtual machine tool. Finally, the NC program converted from the developed postprocessor has been verified with commercial software.

Computer Aided Process Planning has received more attention recently due to considerable progress in the aspects of both technology and theory. Beside the traditional trends and efforts to integrate the product design and process planning activities usually referred to as concurrent engineering, virtual manufacturing tools have opened new horizons to this domain. This paper describes how to combine an existing modular fixture design with process planning and simulation tools. The proposed concurrent architecture consists of a

functional model

and an

operational workflow

for the design of modular fixtures within the process-planning phase. Two different paradigms, the Variant and the Generative, are discussed in relation to the proposed architecture. Fixtures for Body in White lines are a crucial design problem in the automotive industry. Therefore, the proposed architecture has been tested and investigated in such an environment.

Virtual design ergonomic evaluation is useful at early design stage where the physical design mock up is not available but human-centred design must be considered. The interactive virtual ergonomics evaluation approach integrates a digital human model (DHM) with a product’s digital mock up to form a DHM-included virtual environment (VE). The DHM is interactively puppeteered by a human player who wears motion capture devices. Posture data recorded by the motion capture devices are sent to ergonomics programs for evaluation. The DHM-included VE developed by previous research suffers from two problems. First, the DHM can only touch or reach the virtual objects but can not grab nor manipulate them. As such the range of posture data that could be acquired is limited. Secondly, the domain experts, who are usually non VR experts, have to resort to VR engineers to specify the interactions between DHM and virtual objects, which make the virtual evaluation process inconvenient and inefficient. This paper discusses an interactive VE in which the DHM could grab objects and manipulate them. A two-level Petri-net (PN) is proposed as a high-level, graphical representation that allows domain experts to quickly and easily define the interactions between the DHM and the virtual object. The first-level PN monitors the object-grabbing status whereas the second-level PN monitors the hand-grabbing status and hand coordination. If the object-grabbing status or the hand-grabbing status is wrong, the PN will stop the posture data recording process, reset the object to its original position, and notice the human player to re-do the operation so that correct posture data could be acquired. A case study is presented in which the proposed method is applied to generate an interactive VE to acquire posture data for evaluating ergonomics problems associated in operating and maintaining a control console in a ship control room.

Laser trackers have been widely used in many industries to meet increasingly high accuracy requirements. In laser tracker measurement, it is complex and difficult to perform an accurate error analysis and uncertainty evaluation. This paper firstly reviews the working principle of single beam laser trackers and state-of-the-art of key technologies from both industrial and academic efforts, followed by a comprehensive analysis of uncertainty sources. A generic laser tracker modelling method is formulated and the framework of the virtual tracker is proposed. The VLS can be used for measurement planning, measurement accuracy optimization and uncertainty evaluation. The completed virtual laser tracking system should take all the uncertainty sources affecting coordinate measurement into consideration and establish an uncertainty model which will behave in an identical way to the real system.

The virtual reality is a multi-functional, interactive and immersible technology. As an advanced engineering design technology, the virtual reality technology (VRT) has been widely used in large mining machinery design and manufacturing. The system is based on DIVISION Mockup2000i2 software. Virtual prototype of the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) is studied in this paper. In addition, the movement simulation of TBM is completed in DIVISION Mockup2000i2. Firstly, CATIA software is adopted to build the parts of TBM. The TBM is assembled in CATIA too. Secondly, the THEOREM software is applied to convert the assembled model of TBM to another format which can be identified in DIVISION MOCKUP2000i2 software.

In order to make the TBM image living, life-like and easy to browse, the light of surface, virtual materials and landmark scenes are set up in DIVISION MOCKUP2000i2 software environment. All motion parameters of the parts are defined before the simulation. Then, the virtual movement simulation of TBM components is analyzed with the behaviors property of MOCKUP. The virtual movement of cutting wheel, screw conveyor machinery and the door of mud out are studied. The virtual movement of segments and segment erector machine are completed by setting up virtual parts and virtual event. Five segments are fixed accurately in a cycle. The relations and interference of the parts movement are examined simultaneity. The hotkey is defined before the simulation, which can trigger the continuous implementation of virtual motion.

In addition, a virtual voice is used to enhance the performance of movement simulation. The virtual prototype of TBM being set up and simulated will have positive significance for design inspection, structural analysis and product introduction without TBM physical prototype being manufactured.

The aim of this study was to develop an efficient and realistic numerical model in order to predict the dynamic response of the friction winder system. The absolute nodal coordinate formulation is an ideal approach for the modelling of friction winder systems. In this study, the rope was modelled as a planar beam element based on an absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The rope element allows the user to control the axial and bending stiffness through the use of two parameters. In this study, the interaction between the rope and the rotating drum is modelled using an elastic approach in which the contact is accounted for by the inclusion of a set of external forces that depend on the penetration between the rope and rotating drum. This made it possible for us to accurately predict the contact forces, including the stick and slip zones between the rope and the drum. Finally, the applicability of the friction winder model was presented and discussed.

The demand of the forging industry for high quality parts combined with a high-level delivery performance is constantly growing. For increasing the level of delivery performance without an increase of the production costs, an integrated production management system covering the tasks of supply chain management (SCM) as well as production planning and control (PPC) being enhanced by logistic risk management and tool maintenance (TM) is set up within the research project SFB489 C4 “Planning and control of flexible supply chains for the production of precision forged components”. This paper provides an overview of achieved results and presents the contents of current research about the co-ordination of PPC and TM.

This research has an objective to create the new indicator for evaluating the performance and efficiency of the machine. This indicator is built as purpose to solve the problems that occurred in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) indicator. OEE is the main indicator of TPM, which focuses on machine maintenance. This indicator emphasizes how to find loss in the machine with no consideration of production cost. As considering the priority between the machine without regarding the machine capacity, production cost and value of the products, it could cause the improper priority to the machine. Therefore, the researcher has built a new indicator and also implemented with fibre cement manufacturing company. In the case study that the machine had been implemented, the result represented that the machine which had the highest OEE at 76.7%, was not the machine that had the lowest production cost loss value. The machine’s overall production loss value costs 25.01 million baht. The machine that has even the least production loss value costs 2.28 million baht has the OEE only 71.7%. This OEE is the lowest in all of machines. The data represents that the OEE cannot sequence the problems appropriately because of the differences of the machines, including production capacity, production cost and the value of the products. These all differences will directly affect to the production loss value of each machine. Consequently, the new indicator in this research has been built to solve these OEE problems. This indicator can sequence the problems of each machine by calculating the production loss and represents the results as the monetary unit.

Lean Machine Tool

is the one which meets all customer’s requirements, just enough without being equipped with any unnecessary features or accessories. In acquiring a new machine tool it is neither easy nor straightforward to decide if a given accessory is desirable or not. Addition of any accessory would affect product cost, performance, reliability, and often in conflicting ways. Decision to select an accessory for a given manufacturing situation, requires large information from manufacturer and end user, apart from engineering judgment and prior experience. The present work is an attempt to develop a methodology for making such decisions and to automate the same in the form of an expert system with inputs from both users and manufacturers of accessories. Based on the proposed methodology, a case study is presented to decide an accessory namely automatic loader/unloader for a given machining application.

Mitigation through ignition and venting prevents potential detonation situations, but the resulting deflagration burn can still pose a threat to containment structures. The purpose of this research is to understand the general behaviour of vented deflagration using simulation. This paper discusses simulation modelling for the deflagration process in large volumes. The simulation is used to estimate pressure development and visualize flame growth during a deflagration. The simulation model is simple and efficient for the complicated deflagration process. It can be used in real time with design changes.

A theoretical analysis model was developed for area contact friction pairs with different micro-textures considering cavitation within the fluid film between two faces. Numerical simulation method was used to study the effect of geometric parameters of different micro-textures on the load carrying capacity and the friction coefficient. Results show that hydrodynamic lubrication problem of textured surfaces has been solved with a single-dimple model and a multi-dimple model. The tendency of the multi-dimple solutions is similar to that of the single dimple model, but the magnitudes of load capacity and friction coefficient are different.

This paper details a method of determining the uncertainty of dimensional measurement for a three dimensional coordinate measurement machine. An experimental procedure was developed to compare three dimensional coordinate measurements with calibrated reference points. The reference standard used to calibrate these reference points was a fringe counting interferometer with the multilateration technique employed to establish three dimensional coordinates. This is an extension of the established technique of comparing measured lengths with calibrated lengths. Specifically a distributed coordinate measurement device was tested which consisted of a network of Rotary-Laser Automatic Theodolites (R-LATs), this system is known commercially as indoor GPS (iGPS). The method was found to be practical and able to establish that the expanded uncertainty of the basic iGPS system was approximately 1 mm at a 95% confidence level.

A method of accurately controlling the position of a mobile robot using an external Large Volume Metrology (LVM) instrument is presented in this paper. Utilizing a LVM instrument such as the laser tracker in mobile robot navigation, many of the most difficult problems in mobile robot navigation can be simplified or avoided. Using the real-time position information from the laser tracker, a very simple navigation algorithm, and a low cost robot, 5mm repeatability was achieved over a volume of 30m radius. A surface digitization scan of a wind turbine blade section was also demonstrated, illustrating possible applications of the method for manufacturing processes.

A new kind of method of evaluating cylindricity error, which named as Mesh Searching Algorithm (MSA), has been presented in this paper. The optimization method and linearization method usually used are not be adopted in this algorithm. The value of cylindricity error can be obtained through calling repeatedly the formula for distance between the point and straight line and the simple judgement using this algorithm. The principle and step of using the algorithm to solve the cylindricity error is detailed described. The simulation reveals that the cylindricity error can be evaluated effectually and accurately by using this method.

Traditionally, tool wear monitoring systems are based on the signals of cutting force, cutting temperature, cutting power, acoustic emission, vibration, etc. Those signals are all sensitive to tool wear, but they can not give the exact amount of tool wear. The monitoring strategies are generally designed qualitatively rather than quantitatively. This study reports a quantitative strategy for tool wear monitoring based on a displacement sensor which can estimate the real-time tool tip receding. The relationship between tool wear and tool tip receding is modelled. A real time quantitative tool wear estimation strategy is suggested and verified with experiments.

In progressive dies, two or more stations are used to produce sheet metal components. Design and fabrication of progressive dies are rather difficult tasks. In this paper, an algorithm which can automatically design the bending sequence for progressive dies is described. A computer program is developed based on the algorithms and it composed of several modules, namely: feature recognition, flat pattern layout, strip layout and die design. In the feature recognition module, all of the features of a 3-D component can be recognized automatically and checked against some manufacturability rules. In the second module, the flat pattern layout of the component is created automatically. In the strip layout module, the bending sequence is determined using fuzzy set theory based on industrial experience. The bending forces are determined in the fourth module and a 2-D layout of the die is designed. The system is developed in Visual Basic on a Solid Works platform.

This paper presents an analytical solution for dynamic response of non-uniform cross sectional area beam neutral axis. Frequency equation due to a free vibration was obtained in the case of fixed-free boundary conditions with spring attached. Firstly, the coefficient matrices for a step beam with spring attached at the point of the step section and at the tip of the beam have been derived considering the boundary conditions. Next equating the determinant of the coefficient matrices to zero one obtains the dimensionless eigenfrequencies of this beam. Finally, the effects of various stiffness dimensionless parameters and various locations of the springs on the free vibration characteristics of this beam are studied.

Today’s manufacturing plants are equipped with heterogeneous software systems for different types of tasks, both manufacturing operations and factory planning. On the operating level software systems are neither yet integrated and thus support separate tasks such as production monitoring, sequence planning, work piece identification, maintenance order management, worker information and others. Nor are MES-systems parts of the integrated industrial engineering chain from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, PLC-programming to operations. Today information technology becomes the main enabler for new processes and structures in manufacturing and logistics.

In this paper the author presents six relevant trends for MES-systems, derived from actual R&D-projects with industrial partners. The mentioned trends are illustrated by examples from projects.

Sheet metal forming is one of the most commonly used manufacturing processes. However, the conventional sheet metal forming process is expensive for prototyping and low volume production. To solve this problem, dieless forming process, also called the Incremental Sheet Metal Forming (ISMF), has become a focal point of the industry in recent years. Currently, ISMF technology is still premature and needs much research and development. This paper presents a novel ISMF process using a high frequency punch without support. This paper presents the studies of the ISMF process by geometric method, the FEM analysis and experiments. Finally, some conclusions are drawn as well as the future work.

The evolution from raw materials to a ready-to-use car runs through innumerable plants and handling stations. Since the potentials for increasing efficiency in the plant engineering process have largely been exhausted in other areas, the cost pressure in the development or re-engineering of plants is increasing. To monitor and control production processes, manufacturing execution systems (MES) like production monitoring and control systems are developed. Today, the engineering of them takes place at the end of the plant planning process. In most cases, the plant already exists at that time. Recognized errors are very time and cost-intensive. However, this engineering effort can be shifted in earlier phases. MES can be connected to and evaluated against the Digital Factory. In doing so, the full range of features of those systems is available at that time. This contribution deals with preconditions, realization and resulting possibilities of virtual MES start-up within the Digital Factory.

Absorbing the dynamics in production and to stabilize the production processes requires high efforts in order control. Today’s IT-systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are specialized in planning technical resources and optimizing deterministic sequences. Inconsistencies in planning have to be compensated by the operational staff at the latest. The vision of High Resolution Information Management (HRIM) is to build upon decentralized and adaptive control mechanisms for the workers in contrast to the traditional centralized control paradigm. In using context information, creating transparency through information and evaluating alternatives in the decision making process, the workers can better be enabled in handling the dynamic inherent in the system. The centralized structure of the companywide planning and control system will therefore not be abolished on the operational area but completed by decentralized self controlling structures.

This paper presents the development of a new modelling constructs enable human and technical resource system to be described coherently and explicitly as ‘configurable’, ‘re-usable’ ‘component’ of manufacturing enterprise, so as to support agile dynamic manufacturing process-resource system design and decision making. These components are referred to as ‘Dynamic Producer Units’ or DPUs. DPU characterization is designed to facilitate: (1) Graphical Representation (2) Explicit Specification and (3) Implementation Description of Resource systems. This enable the modelling of responsive production systems; where such systems comprise user defined configurations of process networks, resource systems and time dependent flows of units of work. The new modelling methods was then applied through a case study concentrate on engine assembly, illustrated how responsive production systems could be designed by using the method, followed by discussion of future development especially the capability of computer executable within simulation modelling environments.

Manufacturing system now reached a point where it can accommodate various kinds of production models. However, its management and control sub-system, i.e. the manufacturing execution system (MES), is still constructed with relatively dedicated framework. Such lag in the development of MES has inevitably caused some problems. A salient one is the lack of adaptability to effectively cope with the diversity of manufacturing processes. This paper aims to provide some resolutions to this problem. After analyzing the adaptability requirements of A-MES in detail, some key techniques are researched including data integrated adapter, developing configurable factory model, reusable business component and data based script driven mechanism. Thereafter, a new kind of adaptable MES framework named A-MES is presented. A-MES is capable of accommodating changes in internal and external manufacturing system with little programming work. Moreover, a implementation system of A-MES is given, which has been successfully applied in different assembly lines in automotive industry.

Manufacturing cost reduction, product quality improvement, training, new product introduction, and cycle time fluctuation are common challenges for semiconductor assembly and test manufacturing (ATM) factories. Manufacturing Execution System (MES) as the bridge connecting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Process Control System (PCS) is essential for manufacturing to collect real-time product line information, support manufacturing decision making/scheduling and increase manufacturing efficiency. This paper will present the operational complexities that are integrated into the MES solution. Based on the special features of ATM and data warehouse technology, the MES architecture has been designed with four layers of integrated automation system including basic functions, data layer, business objects/methods and user interface. As the MES adopting this approach turns into reality, overall manufacturing competition advantage and production process management improve greatly. Furthermore, this system has been applied to all Intel ATM factories. The successful implementation of this system has explored a new approach for the high volume manufacturing systems in discrete manufacturing enterprise.

The assembly systems need to react frequently on everyday changes like introduction of new products and variants, load variations, change of process modules, etc. In order to answer these challenges more effectively, quickly, automatically and with sustainability, new methods are required. The paper proposes as one basic part of the solution a concept called Emplacement to specify, manage and use the information of process equipment in modular, reconfigurable and agile systems like Evolvable Assembly Systems. First part of the paper presents shortly the framework where the proposed concept can be applied in the phases of systems design, deployment and execution. The essential is the link between the

assembled product

and

equipment module

through the

processes

combining the two former. The second and main part focuses on introduction of the

Emplacement concept

itself. The concept has three main components –

Emplacement, Blue Print and History Container

– providing the electronic description of a module in XML based format. The first two are standardised and they provide the virtual representation of the production modules including essential information like mechatronics interfaces, capabilities i.e. skills, properties (both business and technical), CAD models, datasheets, etc. The interconnection between and details of these languages are discussed in the following chapters.

Current major road mapping efforts, such as ManuFuture, FutMan and EUPASS, have all clearly underlined that true industrial sustainability will require far higher levels of systems’ autonomy and adaptability. In accordance with these recommendations, the Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) has aimed at developing such technological solutions and support mechanisms. Since its inception in 2002 as a next generation of production systems, the concept is being further developed and tested to emerge as a production system paradigm. The essence of evolvability resides not only in the ability of system components to adapt to the changing conditions of operation, but also to assist in the evolution of these components in time such that processes may become self-X, x standing for one more desirable properties of a system subjected to a variable operation condition such as self-evolvable, self-reconfigurable, self-tuning, self-diagnosing, etc. Characteristically, Evolvable systems have distributed control, and are composed of intelligent modules integrated. To assist the development and life cycle issues, comprehensive methodological framework is being developed. A concerted effort is being exerted through European research projects in collaboration with European manufacturers, technology/equipment suppliers, and universities. After briefly stating the fundamental concepts of EPS, this paper presents current developments and applications.

This paper presents an evaluation and discussion of the digital factory tools, based on various software applications. The aim is to map the software tools within the digital factory and evaluate them with regard to the digital factory theory. This work aims to compare research theory with the software tools that are available on the market and how they differ. It is important to know how the commercial state-of-the-art software tools differ from the research theory of the digital factory, for further research development. A test case has been carried out to realize a mini digital factory based on commercial software.

To face current socio-economic adverse conditions enterprises must increase their efficiency and evolve to the requirements of customization and sustainability. Modern production systems need to deal with instability of markets and resource scarcity regarding an economical, ecological and social concern. The Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) has aimed at developing such technological solutions and support mechanisms that may endow European assembly companies to fulfil these demands. EPS seeks highly adaptable control and mechanical systems enhancing re-usability and interoperability of modules, extending their life cycle and enabling short deployment times at shop floor level. Only with very agile and adaptable systems will be possible to enhance material re-usability, reduce energy consumption and give a quick response to unforeseen changed conditions or new business opportunities. This paper will present Evolvable Production Systems advantages in order to achieve such results towards more ecological and economically suitable production systems.

The implementation of Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is one of the promising approaches to cope with the market and process requirements for production nowadays. Rapid changes, minor batch sizes, cost pressure, and ever more aspects of sustainability may give an impression of the situation system integrators have to face. A similar and in some areas much more complex situation can be seen in micro system technology production. Especially hybrid micro systems are characterised by sometimes complex fabrication chains reacting heavily on induced changes. This is shown by example of a micro-optical sensor system. The assembly process as the key fabrication process of such a hybrid micro system is outlined, and some approaches supporting the development of EPS realised during the EU-IP EUPASS are shown. A closer look at the process sequence for the sensor after a process step change shows that there is a need for a more comprehensive methodology which comprises not only the view on the manipulation sequences and/or the design for X approach but also pure part manufacturing coming from the front-end. Finally, the concept of the comprehensive micro-assembly process-oriented methodology for evolvable micro production systems is shortly outlined.

Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is a fundamentally new paradigm to design, maintain and evolve industrial systems. It is a holistic approach supporting product/shop floor co-evolution and ensuring a tailored and balanced solution for sustainable enterprise development. Its core is engineered by distributed intelligence materialized in proactive and interacting shop floor assets. These intelligent building blocks include a wise interface design that ensures plug-ability and promotes system integration and bio-inspired interaction mechanisms (control and monitoring/diagnosis) to emerge a consistent self-organizing response to production disturbances. In this article a short survey on recent technical and theoretical developments supporting the EPS paradigm is held.

The ultimate aim when designing an assembly system is to make it strategically and operationally competitive. Competitive systems for manufacturing, especially assembly systems, have to cope with frequent changes of demands. The aim to have a short response time to customer demand, e.i. mass customization, requires assembly systems that are reliable, have high availability and have ability to produce the right product correctly. This means a combination of short resetting time and ability to vary the systems output of products. A major challenge is to minimize the lead-time that directly has influence on order-to-delivery time, while maintaining product flexibility and robustness to absorb late market changes. Given that the assembly system is working the way it is supposed to do, the order-to-delivery time is directly dependant on the setup time and the operation time. The problem is that automated assembly systems have a low availability due to that technical equipment does not work, caused by lack of knowledge, breakdowns, limited ability to perform the operation etc. This often leeds to that when a company needs variant flexibility they keep the assembly system tasks manual. Totally manual assembly system is not the future for competitiveness. Therefore we need to develop assembly systems that are available and have product flexibility to absorb late market changes, and still have a short order-to delivery time. This paper focuses on the level of automation and is a contribution to future evaluation of how technical solutions either support or work counter to proactivity. The result is a model for evaluation of technical solutions contribution to proactivity. This paper describes a model for assessment of technology and assembly system solutions that fulfil requirements for a proactive assembly system. Criteria for proactivity in different technical solutions of assembly system are reviewed.

Fluctuations in demand patterns and products’ mixes, driven by continuous changes in customer requirements, are inducing significant changes on the operations of manufacturing organisations. How to respond to such changes rapidly and at minimum cost constitutes a major challenge for manufacturers. The DIMS project (Dynamically Integrated Manufacturing Systems) has developed an agent-based approach that enables manufacturing systems to be modelled using multi-agent systems such that optimal and timely responses to changes are generated from the interactions taking place within the multi-agents systems. This approach also incorporates a distributed discrete event simulation mechanism that enables ‘what-if’ system configurations that have been generated through agent interactions to be evaluated dynamically for system restructure. This paper presents the approach with particular focus on the distributed simulation mechanism.

This research addresses a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem using a simulation approach. The scheduling problem is characterized by two features—blocking scheduling and sequence dependent setup time. The objective of the scheduling is to minimize the makespan, i.e. the time needed to complete all jobs. Different dispatching rules have been evaluated and their relative performances have been compared. The experimental results indicate that the commonly good dispatching rules in usual job shop scheduling like FIFO and SPT do not perform better or even much worse than LPT in the studied scheduling problem. The main reason is the special characteristic of the scheduling problem. Although this paper proposes some dispatching rules which perform well in minimizing the makespan, further researches are needed to find better dispatching rules for this kind of scheduling environment. The simulation uses the Flexism software as the coding and testing environment.

Economic lot-scheduling problem (ELSP) has been studied since the 1950’s. ELSP deals with the scheduling of the production of several products on a single machine in a cyclical pattern. The machine can only produce one single product at a time, and there is a set-up cost and set-up time associated with each product. Researchers generally adopted two types of rounding off methods for the production frequency of products, namely, the nearest integer and power–of–two approaches. Production frequency of products defines the number of times that such product being produced during the cycle. Therefore, different production frequency actually leads to different optimization results. For this reason, this paper proposes a modified hybrid genetic algorithm to deal with this problem. Numerical examples are used to test the performance of the new approach. Results demonstrate the significance of the production frequency to the optimization results.

Maintaining the reliability of aircraft engines in an acceptable level requires an optimal maintenance strategy and planning for each entity in the network. This paper proposes an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and genetic algorithm (GA) hybrid model to deal with the maintenance scheduling problem of aircraft engine, which is an optimization problem formulated with respect to multiple objectives and soft constraints. GA, using an integer representation, is applied to obtain the best solution resulting in a minimal value of maintenance costs and time and maximal value of available cycles after maintenance in the analyzed period. AHP handles the decision-maker’s attitude toward preferences of the multiple objectives. The proposed method was tested using a maintenance company data for PW4077D engines and the obtained results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach for engine maintenance scheduling applications.

This model proposed an ant colony optimization model to tackle human resource constrained parallel machine scheduling problem with precedence constraints. In this model, four subsystems are designed to solve the problem, including input subsystem which conducts the problem and the ACO model related parameters and output subsystem which exports scheduling and analysis results, sequence searching subsystem which constructs feasible sequence for each ant, human resource scheduling and sequence evaluation subsystem which assigns human resource and determines the duration time of jobs under the allowable amount of operators. The model is demonstrated to be valid using an example case.

The automation of intrabay system in 300mm semiconductor wafer fabrication system is complex due to complicated product mixes, mass and dynamic transportation demands, transportation deadlock, and vehicle blockage. To obtain better overhead hoist transport (OHT) dispatching solution in intrabay system, a fuzzy logic based greedy dynamic priority dispatching policy is proposed. With experimental data from a 300mm semiconductor wafer fabrication system, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach has the better comprehensive performance than FEFS dispatching rule in aspect of cycle time, delivery time, transport time, movement, throughput, due date satisfaction, and WIP in intrabay system.

The objective of this research is to develop methodology and algorithms for web-based digital manufacturing, supported by real-time monitoring for dynamic scheduling. This paper presents in particular an integrated approach for developing a web-based system, including distributed process planning, real-time monitoring and remote machining. It is enabled by a Wise-ShopFloor (

W

eb-based

i

ntegrated

s

ensor-driven

e-ShopFloor

) framework targeting distributed yet collaborative manufacturing environments. Utilizing the latest Java technologies (Java 3D and Java Servlet) for system implementation, this approach allows users to plan and control distant shop floor operations based on runtime information from the shop floor. Details on the principle of the Wise-ShopFloor framework, system architecture, and a proof-of-concept prototype are reported in this paper. An example of distributed process planning for remote machining is chosen as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach toward web-based digital manufacturing.

Dimensional and form inspections are key to the manufacturing and assembly of products. Product verification can involve a number of different measuring instruments operated using their dedicated software. Typically, each of these instruments with their associated software is more suitable for the verification of a pre-specified quality characteristic of the product than others. The number of different systems and software applications to perform a complete measurement of products and assemblies within a manufacturing organisation is therefore expected to be large. This number becomes even larger as advances in measurement technologies are made. The idea of a universal software application for any instrument still appears to be only a theoretical possibility. A need for information integration is apparent. In this paper, a design of an information system to consistently manage (store, search, retrieve, search, secure) measurement results from various instruments and software applications is introduced. Two of the main ideas underlying the proposed system include abstracting structures and formats of measurement files from the data so that complexity and compatibility between different approaches to measurement data modelling is avoided. Secondly, the information within a file is enriched with meta-information to facilitate its consistent storage and retrieval. To demonstrate the designed information system, a web application is implemented.

This paper focuses on the development of a data model to describe the functional capability of resources within the scope of fast and automatic generation of replies to customer requests. Starting with a description of the purpose and the solution approach this paper presents the stepwise procedure to develop such a data model. The modeling starts with the creation of a basic model which is used as a base for the further development of an object-oriented data model using UML (Unified Modeling Language). This step includes creation of use cases as well as activity und class diagrams. The modeling process is finalized by the transformation of the data model into a database that is capable of storing information about resources and allocates them to other work packages of the solution approach.

Measurement system configuration or deployment is becoming an important issue in the technique field of large volume metrology. Almost all configuration works are task-specific and heavily rely on time-consuming and labor-intensive experiment on shop-floor. Furthermore, such configuration way is difficult to be carried out in the early stages (product and process design) of large complex product development because it is not based on the direct product model. Therefore, there is a strong need to establish optimal configuration model and to perform configuration simulation before the implementation of actual physical deployments or setups on shop-floor (online). This paper firstly presents a problem definition and a classification scheme for large-scale measurement system. Then a general framework and main procedures for measurement system configuration are proposed. The general framework is consisted of four tasks: (1) select instruments, (2) solve feasible space domain, (3) simulate measurement points, and (4) estimate and visualize uncertainty. The rough configuration performs the former two tasks to maximize the accessible volume, while the fine configuration conducts the latter two tasks to minimize the measurement uncertainty. Main algorithms involved with the procedures in the measurement system configuration are identified. A CAD-directed prototype for measurement system configuration has been developed to identify the suitable deployment solution for specific measurement task. An initial experiment study of a wing rib of airplane has demonstrated the effectiveness of the framework and methodologies.

Integration of the measurement activity into the production process is an essential rule in digital enterprise technology, especially for large volume product manufacturing, such as aerospace, shipbuilding, power generation and automotive industries. Measurement resource planning is a structured method of selecting and deploying necessary measurement resources to implement quality aims of product development. In this research, a new mapping approach for measurement resource planning is proposed. Firstly, quality aims are identified in the form of a number of specifications and engineering requirements of one quality characteristics (QCs) at a specific stage of product life cycle, and also measurement systems are classified according to the attribute of QCs. Secondly, a matrix mapping approach for measurement resource planning is outlined together with an optimization algorithm for combination between quality aims and measurement systems. Finally, the proposed methodology has been studied in shipbuilding to solve the problem of measurement resource planning, by which the measurement resources are deployed to satisfy all the quality aims.

Aircraft manufacturing industries are looking for solutions in order to increase their productivity. One of the solutions is to apply the metrology systems during the production and assembly processes. Metrology Process Model (MPM) (Maropoulos et al, 2007) has been introduced which emphasises metrology applications with assembly planning, manufacturing processes and product designing. Measurability analysis is part of the MPM and the aim of this analysis is to check the feasibility for measuring the designed large scale components. Measurability Analysis has been integrated in order to provide an efficient matching system. Metrology database is structured by developing the Metrology Classification Model. Furthermore, the feature-based selection model is also explained. By combining two classification models, a novel approach and selection processes for integrated measurability analysis system (MAS) are introduced and such integrated MAS could provide much more meaningful matching results for the operators.

Metrology processes used in the manufacture of large products include tool setting, product verification and flexible metrology enabled automation. The range of applications and instruments available makes the selection of the appropriate instrument for a given task highly complex. Since metrology is a key manufacturing process it should be considered in the early stages of design. This paper provides an overview of the important selection criteria for typical measurement processes and presents some novel selection strategies. Metrics which can be used to assess measurability are also discussed. A prototype instrument selection and measurability analysis application is presented with discussion of how this can be used as the basis for development of a more sophisticated measurement planning tool.

The dimensioning of multistage machining processes consisting of roughing and finishing operations requires a linked consideration of the transformation of target values over all stages. The analytical hierarchy approach (AHP) is used to solve the arising multi-criteria problem regarding technologic and economic criteria based on empirical process models. Therefore, the presented concept includes existing interdependencies by the means of transfer values leading to an effective and comprehensible dimensioning of multistage machining processes. The concept is implemented into a software prototype programmed in JAVA. Individual process stages, targets and criteria can be implemented by the decision maker. The resulting overall target function consists of preference multipliers and standardized sub-criteria functions weighted by AHP. High values of the target-function point out combinations of process parameters for each stage that yield to a multi-criteria optimized multistage process. The concept is exemplary illustrated by means of a multistage grinding operation for 4-cylinder crankshafts.

This paper presents an integrated application of design of experiments (DOE) with support vector machine (SVM) for manufacturing process modeling in order to achieve a high accuracy model. The proposed method is as follows. First, DOE is applied to indicate the critical parameters of the process. Due to the nature of defective distribution is binomial; fundamental DOE assumptions may be violated. Consequently, Freeman and Turkey (F&T) transformation was applied to the percentage of the surface appearance defect. Then the residual analysis was opted for model adequacy checking. Last but not least, the response surface methodology (RSM) model is sufficient following DOE assumptions. Then, support vector regression (SVR) was used to establish the nonlinear multivariate relationships between process parameters and responses. Data obtained from designed experiments were used in the training process. Last a grid search was adopted to the SVR model to find the optimum parameter setting. Data from real experiments of the powdering process parameters for alumina substrate sheet for product A were used to demonstrate the proposed method. Other prominent approaches, namely RSM data and artificial neural networks (ANN) learning with quick propagation algorithm (Quickprop), were conducted for comparison purposes. The experimental results suggested that the SVR was capable of high accuracy modeling and resulted in much smaller error in comparison with the results from ANN learning with quick propagation algorithm and full factorial. After searching the optimum condition from the SVR model, it was 6.5 cm of distance and the minimum level of other factors. After performing verification runs, it can be efficiently employed to reduce the percentage of surface appearance defect from 5.8% to 4.0 %. As a result, the direct cost of company has been cut down by approximately $5,200 per month from the enchanting operation of powdering machines for alumina substrate sheet.

The practice of process mining concerns the reconstruction of complete process flow diagrams from data logs. In an increasingly complex business environment, there is a need for managers to understand the processes they already have in place. Process mining facilitates the automatic reconstruction of a flowchart description based on a set of execution traces. The process mining approach featured in this paper utilises a Genetic Programming approach to process mining using a graph representation. The results from a number of experiments are detailed in this paper and point to its potential as a practical tool for use in industry. The principles investigated in this approach form a core component of future research by the authors in the area of process disparity identification.

Optical components with complex surfaces, like aspherical or free-formed surfaces, can be considered as typical examples for complex products. In the Transregional Research Project SFB/TR4 the manufacturing of such optical components is analysed. One main aspect in the project is the question of how to improve the production process planning in order to ensure that the technical and financial objectives of the process chain are achieved. For that reason an approach has been developed that is based on the concept of Quality Gates and the method of Design Review bases on Failure Mode (DRBFM). The approach aims at comparing the capabilities of the single process steps and the manufacturing demands resulting from the design phase using the concept of Quality Gates. Therefore, the overall requirements on the whole process chain must be assigned to the single process steps in a systematic way. Further one, with the help of a modified DRBFM worksheet potential problems during production can be discovered and eliminated early in the design phase.

In order to solve the problems existing in the Computer-aided Process Planning (CAPP) system when it handle the mass data storing and parallel accessing, this paper proposes a solution based on the distributed data storing architecture. We analyze the reasons causing the problems and change the system’s architecture, furthermore we integrate other technologies such as intelligent and adaptive load balancing algorithm, model lightweighting in multiple granularity and multi-dimensional data clustering to enhance the system’s capability on mass data storing and parallel accessing.

In order to optimize part machining service combination, an approach is proposed from the perspective of improving assembly fit quality. Difference between part tolerance and error is regarded as evaluation index. Simulated annealing is adopted to look for the best solution with little time consumption. An example shows that, the method benefits quality and efficiency of part machining service combination optimization remarkably.

A new heuristic is proposed as a modification to the clonal selection based algorithm called the CLONALG of Artificial Immune Systems. In the CLONALG algorithm, the objective function values of the antibodies are used as an index for affinity, selection and mutation. It does not include a specified set of antigens to solve optimization problems. This mere use of objective function values hinders the utilization of the pattern recognition and adaptation ability of the Immune systems principles. Therefore, in the proposed heuristic, a Structural Similarity Index (SSI) is introduced as an additional criterion to facilitate the antibodies in exploiting the solution structures of antigens and clone accordingly. A hypothetical example problem from an automotive industry is solved to illustrate the application of the proposed heuristic and the results are compared with those obtained using the CLONALG algorithm. The comparison revealed that proposed solution methodology has a faster convergence pattern than the original CLONALG algorithm in solving the type of the underlying optimization problem.

To meet the challenge of producing innovative and technologically demanding products economically, companies need the ability of quick and flexible reaction to internal and external disturbances. Increased performance of a company can be achieved by focusing on improvements to effectiveness and efficiency; principal tasks of modern quality management. Quality management itself must not only face new entrepreneurial challenges; its main task remains consistently providing information for continuous improvements. Based on a new definition of quality, a framework is introduced that faces the entrepreneurial conditions from quality management’s point of view and provides an organizational element, which assists in meeting the demand for informational transparency. This element, the quality backward chain, which is responsible for providing the needed information, is then introduced. By means of a modular conception on the operative and the adaptive levels, the backward chain acts as a quick and flexible organizational controller for entrepreneurial quality.

In the last two decades, enterprise solutions like Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), Supply Chain Analytics system (SCA), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and e-Service have been greatly improving the productivity and operational efficiency in manufacturing. However, a new survey found that, when it comes to the integration of enterprise solutions across the boundaries of enterprises such as the case of supply chain collaboration to support e-Manufacturing, the successful rate of such implementation is extremely low. This paper argues that, while the million-dollar, fancy enterprise solution such as SCA and other e-Manufacturing supporting systems may gain success within an enterprise, it may not be extendable to external organizations due to the complexity of implementation involving different business processes and workflows, different systems and different culture of people. The recommended solution to this problem is to focus on the nature of the integrated business process and workflow instead of fancy software solution. We need to come back to the basics, the nature of the business. A newly created Operation-Over-The-Net (OOTN) architecture, which is a multi-dimensional gateway transmitting events therefore actions along the supply chain horizon and from end-customer directly, is introduced in this paper as a back-to-basic Operation Management (OM) tool. It is demonstrated that a highly effective Operation Meeting Solution (OMS) can easily extend internal OM to manage supply chain collaboration. The solution has been proven by a million-wafer global supply network in semiconductor industry since 2000.

To cope with dynamic changes and disturbances, manufacturing systems are required to have constant adaptability, agility, stability, self-organization, intelligence and robustness. By referencing the biological organization structure and mechanism, the concept of Bio-inspired Manufacturing System (BiMS) is proposed. The model of BiMS is presented to be composed of Bio-inspired Manufacturing Cells (BiMCs). Taking BiMS as a biological body, BiMC can be looked as the organ at different levels. Inspired by the ultra-short feedback mechanism of the natural neuro-endocrine system, the control and coordination mechanism between BiMCs is investigated, and a bio-inspiredself-adaptive manufacturing system control architecture is established based on the neuro-endocrine-immunity system (NEIS). Meanwhile, the pheromone communication mechanism has been used to improve the robustness of BiMS. A simulation platform has been set up to verify the functions of BiMS.

Digital-technologies based service-oriented enterprise networks (SOEN) are emerging. The performance optimization for SOEN is very complex. It is needed: first, to try to reduce an abstract service’s waiting-number of its physical services; second, to optimize the service-orchestration-schemes of the physical services waited before. This paper introduces an uncertainty theory and genetic algorithm-based performance optimization method (UGPO) to solve these problems. The uncertainty theory of UGPO is used to determine an abstract service’s waiting-number for its physical services. The genetic algorithm of UGPO is used to search for the best service-orchestration-scheme from a large number of potential combinatorial schemes by the physical services waited before. UGPO has made use of the information of the physical services’ arriving rules and performance distribution functions thoroughly, which will improve the computational efficiency for the scheme design and performance optimization of the SOEN in digital enterprise environments.

Along with the service sector plays a more critical role in the development of world economy, conventional manufacturer puts more focus on bundling service with physical products to gain competitive advantage. Based on the traditional theory of supply chain management, this paper proposes

Service Supply Chain

to cover the supply chains for both service industry and manufacturing industry. Then a

Product-Service Matrix

is established to reveal the nature of the service supply chain. A

Servitization-Globalization Matrix

is developed to describe the evolution footprint from conventional manufacturing factory to

Global Service Network

and

Global Manufacturing Network

. Finally, this paper establishes a conceptual framework for service supply chain management, and the management processes are proposed and compared with other model.

Recently small and medium enterprises have strived to collaborate with them to maintain the global trend of manufacturing environment and to satisfy various requirements of customers rapidly. To accomplish the collaboration with enterprises, a collaborative business processes should be defined at first, and the legacy systems of enterprises should be also integrated. However, the system integration brings about realistic problems such as time and cost, information sharing and security, etc. To resolve those problems, this study proposes a framework of system integration including a milestone model which manages only events and outputs of process, and a service which connects the milestone model to legacy systems. It also proposes the architecture of service handling to manage a lot of services requested from activities during executing the collaborative business process. A management scenario which describes the role of project managers and members is prepared to execute collaborative projects smoothly on the collaborative business process. To check the feasibility of the proposed framework, this study implements a prototype integration portal and develops Milestone Designer program to help process managers with modeling the enterprise milestone model easily. The prototype portal reveals that the proposed framework is valid to apply to a real value chain.

In view of unprecedented challenges brought by ever changing, global and competitive market conditions, manufacturing industry worldwide needed to cut its costs and overheads. And there were growing demands for flexible, fast, well-planned manufacturing system design. Therefore, manufacturing systems started to move from distributed manufacturing and global manufacturing towards cross-organization e-manufacturing by using inter-connected web systems. In this paper, the definition and features of e-Manufacturing is introduced. Then, in view of the difficulties and characteristics of the aircraft tooling manufacturing, an aircraft tooling e-Manufacturing architecture based on mobile agents is proposed. And some key technologies are discussed to support this architecture. Finally, an aircraft tooling e-Manufacturing prototype system has been developed according to the aircraft tooling e-Manufacturing architecture.

As markets, technologies and competitive forces continue to change at ever increasing rates, organisations are becoming more pressing for reform. To compete and survive in these global markets requires a logistic oriented organisation, specifically the need to move goods greater distances quickly and efficiently. Such a radical change entails a regrouping within the organisation so that the key tasks become the management of cross-functional work flows. In this paper, the importance of information sharing has been reviewed and six types of logistic networks have been illustrated. Emphasis has been placed on designing the network on operational considerations such as capacities, geographical locations and core competences as well as market factors and demand. A mixed integer programming method has been used to minimize the logistic network cost and numerical experiments are performed using a brand-and-bound solver from LINDO. The analysis results demonstrate that the proposed mixed integer programming can provide certain combinations of routing rules and locations which result in low logistic costs while maintaining high levels of customer service.

Nowadays, automobile industry builds and operates manufacturing systems in developing countries, e.g., low wage countries in order to cope with global market competition. System planners have to pay attention to the conditions coming from the agreement between the investing companies and the developing countries. Normally, there are some limitations such as employing a certain number of workers. So a manufacturing system used in the competence location, i. e., high wage country should be reformed to fulfil the requirements of the conditions.

In this paper, the planning method of designing the most appropriate system for manufacturing transmission gears in a developing country is presented. Thinking Process of TOC (Theory of Constrains) as well as 3D simulation of digital manufacturing methodology are applied to analyze alternatives and get results logically, quickly and objectively.

This paper presents a conceptual design for a new generation of automated warehouses, which are made from a series of simple modules with their inherent feature of scalability and reonfigurability. A potential application example of this type of warehousing system is modelled to indicate the level of capability that the concept may provide. Physical infrastructure and operational control events within the system are illustrated in the paper. The simulation results demonstrate that the warehouse can simultaneously deliver large numbers of items from storage modules to assigned collection points with minimal delay. This can be achieved by deploying an integrated warehouse control and management mechanism using automatic identification and data capture techniques and wireless communication networks. A framework on application of these emerging technologies in order to deliver the desired coordinated functionality of such a warehousing system is also discussed in the paper.

An optimization-based approach is developed for routing a just-in-time (JIT) supply system, which requires for high-frequency, small quantity deliveries. The mathematical model called common frequency routing problem (CFR) is formulated. To solve the model, tabu search strategies have been developed. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through a computational experiment. The result shows that in the same demand conditions, the total transport distance is shorten, the total times of vehicle trips is reduced and side inventory decreases.

The extensive use of Poka-Yoke (Mistake-proofing) devices enables Jidoka (machines with human intelligence) as one of the two pillars of Toyota Production System (TPS). Despite the worldwide adoption of Lean/TPS and the key contribution of Poka-Yoke to the Japanese quality miracle, Poka-Yoke has been largely ignored in academia. This paper narrows the research gap by introducing Information System Design (ISD) as a new way of design for Poka-Yoke and illustrating how wireless communication technologies increase the capacity of ISD Poka-Yoke. A case study is conducted in the paper to explain how wireless devices enabled ISD eliminate three types of human errors in a manufacturing logistics process. In general, ISD Poks-Yoke overcomes the limitation of traditional Engineering Design (ED) Poka-Yoke, by extending the applicability of Poka-Yoke concept to non-production processes. With the integration of wireless devices, ISD can even be used to mistake-proof logistics processes which are often mobile in nature.

Supply chain’s complexity and strong randomness affecting the robustness of the system, study the entire supply chain system, analysis of supply chain elements of the node enterprises, logistics, capital flow, information flow, and their mutual relations and transfers between the state, with the addition of variable method, the use of partial differential equations to establish a supply chain system Markov chain model. Analysis of the economic crisis on the impact of supply chain systems, and make robust supply chain strategy under the situation of the economic crisis to optimize the operation.

This paper discusses a problem of pricing and replenishment decisions for a system consisting of a single vendor and a single retailer. The retailer faces a stochastic customer demand, and adopts a continuous review (

r,Q

) policy for replenishing inventory from the vendor. At the beginning of the time horizon, the retailer chooses his expected sales target, and satisfies customer demands with resultant price that depends on the sales target. Taking the optimal centralized solution as benchmark, we analyze the system performances with wholesale-price contract and revenue-sharing contract, respectively. Numerical computations show that the performance of the revenue-sharing contract dominants the wholesale-price contract in most of the regular cases.

Fierce market competition forces enterprises to produce customized products with the cost and delivery time of mass production. A widely advocated approach is to use the concept of product family. Frequently, complex supply chains are managed under the combination of both make-to-stock and make-to-order strategies to reduce safety stock cost, while in the same or even shorter service time to the external customers. The question arising is at which stage to position safety stock effectively in the supply chain for a product family. After the analysis especially the benefit of positioning safety stock of a family of products as a whole instead of individually, this paper models the safety stock placement of a product family supply chain as an optimization problem, which can be solved conveniently by a specially designed genetic algorithm.

Tourism industry is supported by the network of organizations and people in the travel industry. Some tourism networks, such as tourism distribution channels and tourism supply chain (TSC), have been explored by some researchers in recent years. The inter-organizational relationships have also received a lot of attention from researchers in tourism area. However, most studies focus on adversarial relationships due to the intensive competitions among the service providers. Many studies on coordination strategies in the manufacturing supply chains have shown that it can result in improved performance and greater profitability for the entire supply chain and participants. It is believed that applying supply chain coordination strategy to the tourism industry provides a new research opportunity to generate insights into how a TSC develops a sustainable competitive advantage, especially when the demand uncertainty is high. Along this line, this paper studies a vertical coordination relationship in a tourism supply chain consisting of tour operators and their accommodation supplier. In regular intervals, tour operators and their supplier sign contracts on the volume that the supplier will allocate to them for the coming season. In the vertical coordination scheme based on return policies, the supplier buys back the unused reservations from tour operators at the end of the season. Game models are used to analyze and establish the coordination relationship. To the best of our knowledge, little in-depth analytical research on coordination strategies adopted in the tourism industry has been carried out, and there has been a particular lack of analysis using game-theoretic approaches.

Many literatures in forward supply chain management point out the importance of product design. In this research, we follow the same concept and apply it to closed-loop supply chain. We consider two closed-loop supply chain structures, Parallel and Mix. In the Parallel structure, the assembly and disassembly lines are separated while in Mix structure they are performed by the same production line. We study how the usage of component commonality, location of common component, and degree of delayed differentiation impact the mean and variance of the cycle time for forward supply chain under these two structures.

Procurement and replenishment are always susceptible to uncertain customer demand and also to purchase price volatility. Single factor approaches such as long-term contracts, spot procurements, or supply contracts with options, can mitigate some specific aspect of the overall risk, but such approaches are often of limited value when several types of risk prevail. This study contributes to the problem of procurement by presenting a portfolio approach that simultaneously deals with the two major types of procurement risk, price and inventory. The specific model presented jointly considers both the procurement planning and risk hedging problems. The model is in the form of a multi-stage stochastic program in which replenishment decisions are made at various stages along a time horizon, with replenishment quantities being jointly determined by the stochastic demand and the price dynamics of the spot market. The model attempts to minimise the risk exposure of procurement decisions measured as conditional value-at-risk. Numerical experiments to test the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results indicate that the proposed model can fairly reliably outperform other approaches, especially when either the demand and/or prices exhibit significant variability.

Based on Lagrange multipliers, the relationship of legal risk management and expenses cost are analyzed and the mathematical model are built. How enterprises make a scheme of legal risk management and distribute the expenses cost are discussed.

According to the Hamburger effect, food products export industry sector, especially cooked chicken products export to Japan of Thai industry, effort has been spent in the supply chain management (SCM) of internal efficiency, solely aiming at competitiveness survival in terms of cost reduction, better quality. To meet the customer satisfaction, the company must work towards a right time and volume of demand delivery. Therefore, forecasting technique is the crucial element of SCM. The more understanding how their company use the right forecasting based on information sharing in their SCM context; the more reducing inventory and capacity planning cost increase their company competitiveness. Presently, most of companies, in this sector, do not have a right knowledge to implement the suitable forecasting system to sustain their business; furthermore, they only use top management judgment and some of economical data for forecasting decision making to production. Because the complex, stochastic, dynamic nature and multi-criteria of the logistics operations along the food products exporting to Japan of Thai industry supply chain, the existing time series forecasting approaches cannot provide the information to operate demand from upstream to downstream effectively. The objective of the paper is how to develop a conceptual framework for an innovative and simplified forecasting system implementation for this industry based on data mining including time series factors and causal factors. Then we discuss a methodology to determine appropriated implementation guideline.

The objective of this paper is to develop a framework explaining the determinants of alignment of new product development (NPD) and supply chain management (SCM). A preliminary framework, established on the basis of existing literature, could not be supported by an exploratory case study, conducted with industry. Therefore, using the insights gained from theory and practice, we extend this framework and develop a more comprehensive one. Variety, modularity, and innovativeness are the product features that should be taken into account when studying alignment. From the supply chain viewpoint, configuration, collaboration, and coordination complexities are the variables that matter. The framework also shows how the variables are related to each other. Variety and innovativeness directly impact all the supply chain variables, but modularity only influences configuration and collaboration. The final framework is then applied to five case studies. There is evidence that innovativeness, a variable so far neglected when dealing with the alignment question, has a critical impact on supply chain management decisions.

As global warming becomes more prevalent and resource scarcity and oil prices continue to rise, a green business strategy has become of greater importance and necessity. Societies and governments have become more sensitive about issues regarding the environment. That is why companies need to react on the challenges of green issues by implementing sustainable or green supply chain management (GSCM). To focus on their competences, a lot of companies outsource their logistics activities to third-party logistics providers. Hence, on the way to green supply chain, not only the companies as outsourcers have impacts, but also the logistics service providers. The main aim of this paper is to identify the different decision making modes towards green supply chain.

This paper outlines why market development efforts could fail by choosing contract logistics providers. This is usually due to the nonexistence of marketing capabilities at contract logistics providers. Hence they are not able to deliver effective and service-dominant solutions. The paper points at consequences in preferring contract logistics providers by comparing them with demand chain leaders which capture marketing as well as logistics capabilities and therefore are being able to offer state-of-the-art business concepts.

Bottlenecks, as the key ingredients for improving the performances of the production networks, have been profoundly studied. However, the major definitions of bottlenecks are derived in terms of the throughput and based on the Theory of Constraints (TOC). Moreover, due to the complex dynamic characteristics of bottlenecks, it is not straightforward to localise bottlenecks before the specific measures can be applied on them. Distinguishing from the traditional view at the bottlenecks, this paper therefore develops a systematic and comprehensive definition of the dynamic bottlenecks of the production networks based on the Bottleneck Oriented Logistic Analysis (BOLA). Our main focus is to model and visualize the defined dynamic bottlenecks using practical data. Finally, the practical application of the proposed research as well as its procedures is discussed according to the Logistic Operating Curves (LOC).

Globalization has resulted in a dynamic environment which is a combination of uncertainties and unpredictable behaviour of customers, enterprise partners and market conditions. As a consequence, manufacturing enterprises tend to improve the monitoring and control of enterprise value creation processes to achieve flexibility and adaptability. Enterprise integration (EI) can be seen as a prerequisite for realizing a multi-loop control system within and across different enterprise levels. Various standards are available for EI but these standards do not mention how to realize them in terms of technology. Therefore, an IT-framework for digital EI based on different standards and technologies is proposed. This IT-framework describes integration of manufacturing level and enterprise control level, graphical user interface for visualization and control, and process control using workflow management system and rule-based system. Finally, a case study is presented showing the application of the IT-framework for different types of manufacturing.

In this paper a framework for Extended Digital Manufacturing Systems (EDMS) is presented. EDMS aim at an integrated environment for products, production systems, and business processes. The reference model of EDMS consists of manufacturing entities with different roles and their related domains and activities. The entities are internally constructed from digital, virtual, real, and communication parts in conjunction with human knowledge and skills. The main areas of EDMS are modelling, simulation, analysis, and change management. The integrated activities of EDMS are discussed from the viewpoints of augmented intelligence and integrated collaboration activities. The theoretical application areas of the past, present, and future and the process from ideas to innovative solutions are presented. A real-life example of a laboratory demonstration of a robot manufacturing cell in which several aspects of the EDMS framework are utilised is introduced.

A reasonable encoding of component parts of product is the basis of implementing informationization for hoisting machinery enterprise. Aimed at the inefficiency of the current encoding system of hoisting machinery, a new encoding method with both classification-code and identification-code based PDM is presented in this paper. And an encoding system based on Client/Server pattern was developed. The feasibility and efficiency of this encoding system is proved in the production.

In the aerospace production industry, the advent of composite materials has had a huge impact on the problem of designing and managing production systems which embed different technologies for the manufacture of complex products. One critical issue is the evaluation of the capability of the resources operating in the manufacturing environment, such as machines, robots and auxiliary devices, across the system lifecycle. During the system design phase having a crystal clear view of the resource capabilities enables the selection of the best set of resources that match the production requirements; also during the system control and management phases, the evaluation of nominal and actual resource functional characteristics allows real-time response to unforeseen events. The research proposed in this paper aims at providing a STEP compliant schema entitled the AeroFRAME knowledge based schema, to represent geometric and functional information on products, processes and systems for the aerospace industry. The paper concludes with an application of a real manufacturing scenario in which new families of manufacturing resources such as Prepreg Cutting Machines, Filament Winding Robots and Automatic Tape Placement machines are represented by the schema.

This paper presents a novel technique to semi-automatically identify metadata for documents when installing a knowledge management system. Document management systems often deal with large collections of documents. This vast amount of information needs to be searchable for the knowledge worker. Supporting techniques are needed to aid the knowledge worker in his search for information. Many of these techniques are based on the presence of metadata for each document. The techniques presented in this paper are based on a novel approach called multilayer clustering. Using this clustering technique, documents can be assigned to one or more document types. Besides this assignment to a specific type, properties and values are assigned to this document based on term networks extracted from this document. The preliminary tests presented in this paper were performed on a public and several private dataset. The results obtained from the tests indicate that this approach is promising.

Risks assessment in capacity expansion project is governed by large number of complex factors. Traditionally, tools like risk registers, risk management spreadsheets, brain storming sessions, individual decisions and so on are used to identify risks in these projects. As a result, many risks remain unidentified, and avoiding failure becomes impossible. Our work aims to resolve this dilemma of decision maker by providing a tool based on text mining and ontology driven approach to assist a decision maker not only by providing all the risks and their prevention measures that can emerge after and during capacity building project but also by evaluating cost associated with them. By including the cost, our model is more realistic in practice. This paper introduces the software we prototyped to achieve our goal.

Today factories can be considered as products, which contribute to value creation by efficient transformation of resources into high-adding value products and which have to be continuously adapted. The engineering of future factories requires digital tools to support the life cycle phases from investment planning to ramp-up and scientific-based integrated highly-dynamic data management systems. This paper presents a Reference Model for holistic Factory Engineering and Design and a Grid-based Factory Data Management, centred on a generic Factory Data Model based on state-of-the-art Grid, workflow and digital manufacturing technologies. The developed planning environ-ment, its architecture, the employed technologies, the estimated benefits and a validation scenario are presented and integrated in a Roadmap of current and future research activities in the field of factory engineering and design.

Recent advances in technologies involved in CNC manufacturing systems have provided industry with the capability to machine complex products. However, there is still no guarantee for these advanced systems to manufacture products to their required specification the first time. This results in large scrap rates of manufactured components and requires skilful resources (human/bespoke solutions) to adjust the involved processes. The solution to this problem is the development of a machine tool process control system which would be able to provide the corrective measures in-process. At the core of this system, is a kernel to map the information in the manufacturing CAx chain. Using the existing high level information on component design, machining processes, manufacturing resources and measurement, process control can be maintained. This leads to seamless information flow in the manufacturing process chain. This paper presents and describes a machine tool process information model. A computational platform for developing a machine tool process control system has then been discussed. This computational prototype has been further realised and demonstrated using a prismatic case study component.

Change control of a product data management (PDM) system is one of the major approaches for handling engineering changes today. During the change control workflow, there are three different dates utilized for engineering change planning and scheduling: release date, effective date, and effectivity date. Effective date is the date that a documented change is implemented and applied to shop floor workshop. Effectivity date is the date that decision makers expect documented changes begin to be applied. In normal situations, multiple disciplines, such as design and development, purchasing, shop floor workshop, quality control, and so on, are involved in a change decision, which will be made on when a change is to become effective. The algorithm and theory of a possible add-on module to current PDM systems is presented in this paper. In this research, a mixed integer programming effectivity decision model is proposed to support changes of design scheduling, and production planning and scheduling concurrently when an engineering change occurred. The proposed model succeeded in solving an integration problem of change management issues (from product data management perspective) and production planning and shop floor scheduling issues (from enterprise resource planning perspective) for engineering change management.

Technology Innovation has become the principal method for enterprises to survive in the competitive economic environment. This paper, by using the Product Life Cycle Theory, discusses the different technology innovation patterns that enterprises can adopt at different stages of the product life cycle. The paper thus develops a number of technology innovation strategies under those different patterns and further summarizes the choice factors that influence technology innovation patterns.

The current business environment is increasingly dependent on strategic information and knowledge in order to survive against competition and sustain profitability. The aerospace defence sector is facing the same challenge, because a good level of knowledge is required in making affordability decision in defence contracts, which could last over 30 to 50 years. In this paper, a system which assesses the level of information that is available for both customer and solution provider to decide whether a contract would be affordable across the project life cycle, is presented. It involves a method of score allocation of affordability factors based on affordability elements across the life cycle. The output helps decision makers in negotiating contracts before project starts. It informs contract deliverable by emphasising areas for data collection and indicates the risk involved in a project based on information availability. Further, the paper identifies limitations as well as areas for future improvement.

Product Service System (PSS) advocates an innovative business mode where manufacturers provide products in the form of services instead of mere entity offerings. This mode not only enhances the utilization rate of products and resources, but also improves the service levels throughout the whole product lifecycle. PSS extension to manufacturing environment results in Production Service System (PnSS), which forms a hierarchically organized service-oriented manufacturing alliance composed of manufacturers/suppliers with various production service capabilities to collaborate a customer order. The process of selecting the optimal production service providers for a PnSS is called Production Service System Configuration (PnSSC). It is difficult to apply a centralized optimization method for a PnSSC problem because the members participating into the PnSS are uncertain while most of them are not willing to submit their decision details to the centralized decision model. This paper therefore proposes an Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) based distributed configuration system, atcPortal, for PnSSC. Each service provider models their production capabilities as a web service hosted at local end while published at atcPortal, while the embedded ATC mechanism will coordinate all the related services to formulate the optimal PnSSC for a given customer order. This distributed optimization system avoids centralized modeling and optimization process and thus protects enterprise privacy.

The conceptual development of Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS

2

) requires the integration of different domains, i.e. mechatronic and service engineering. Considering this integration, an IPS

2

concept model and an IPS

2

concept development methodology have been proposed. Applying model and methodology to an evaluation example reveals that even simple IPS

2

can reach a high level of complexity in the conceptual design phase. To handle this complexity and to optimise the development of IPS

2

concepts, developers need comprehensive knowledge of participated domains and effective development tools. In this paper an approach for a knowledge based assistance is presented, which supports developers in different tasks of IPS

2

concept development. Focus of the paper is the knowledge based support of the IPS

2

concept development methodology by deducing concepts for IPS

2

from given requirements. Starting with the basic understanding of IPS

2

concept modelling and conceptual development, the paper describes the requirements for a knowledge based assistance system. Based on these requirements, an approach has been developed and implemented in a software prototype. This paper concludes with the application of the approach on an evaluation example.

Service coupling is the key process to SOA Projects. Cooperation in the process of the service coupling is the main non-technical factors to the success of SOA Projects. In this paper, the system dynamic model is established basing on the cooperation factors between SOA project team and ESB suppliers in the process of service coupling; some factors are analyzed to the dynamic influence of the project performance such as initial cooperation willingness, communication effort and emergency events, the study of simulation is carried on, so the constructive suggestion in the process of SOA projects is made.

It was investigated that most product faults typically originate in the development and planning stages and around 80% of faults remains undetected until final test or when the product was in use. For complex products such as aircraft and automobiles, Key Characteristics (KCs) play a significant role in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and in integrated product development. Organisations can concentrate their attention on those “critical few” product characteristics during their product and process design and production. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is recognized as a powerful tool for planning and improving quality and reliability during product development. The effectiveness of FMEA implementation is heavily reliant on the reuse of FMEA knowledge and the integration of FMEA with product and process design. However, FMEA has disadvantages in that: (1) the benefits of implementing FMEA are almost counteracted by tedious procedures and high costs as organizations and personnel try to analyse all product functions and characteristics in detail; (2) it is not well integrated with computer aided product development systems or tools including CAD and CAPP (Computer Aided Process Planning). This paper proposes a novel approach to effectively utilizing FMEA knowledge during product and process design by establishing an integration framework and model and by realizing timely KCs-driven failures analysis and prevention. The integrated framework adopts Web-based process FMEA as the knowledge service to close the loop of product development and production including process design, process planning, verification and validation as well as production. The proposed integrated process and information model is able to link with the product, process model and resource model. During product design and process planning, key characteristics are used as the main drivers for FMEA knowledge query and feedback. The correction or improvement actions from FMEA can be used to update the designing product model and process plan. A web-based and service-oriented process FMEA tool has been developed, and the integration effectiveness has been validated by a case study from aerospace industry.

The release of AS/EN9100:2009 standards will force many enterprises and suppliers to demonstrate enhanced quality compliant in order to obtain long term competitiveness in the aerospace global supply chain. The new standard provides the framework for developing and formulating innovative novel business models which become the foundation to build a competitive, customer-centric sustainable enterprise. Various enterprise modelling methods have been developed in recent years so as to offer support for enterprise design and help specify systems requirements and solutions. However, those techniques are not efficient in providing sufficient support for quality systems assessment and development. Changes to the standards had left the implementation parts of the processes linked to the standards remaining ambiguous. Using IDEF-Q as a modelling technique, this research strives to integrate with the new AS/EN9100 quality elements through the systematic integration approach which can help the enterprises in business re-engineering process. The assessment capability model is also presented to identify impacts on the existing system as a result of introducing new standards.

This paper presents an innovative gateway technology. A gateway is physically composed of smart objects (SOs) that are logically related to each other according to a shop-floor workflow configuration. Although smart objects are equipped with heterogeneous RFID devices, they are converted into standard web services using the concept of agents. The resulted agent-based smart objects (ASOs) are then centrally managed through a specially purposed Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry (soUDDI) where facilities such as register, publish, find, bind and invoke are provided for ASOs. Through these facilities, smart objects can be deployed at a gateway in a “plug and play” fashion. Real-time data are collected by smart objects from the shop floor and processed by the corresponding gateway for further application in enterprise information systems (EISs). The proposed framework is demonstrated through a smart forklift gateway around which smart objects are deployed.

In extended enterprises, real-time manufacturing information tracking plays an important role and aims to provide the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format to achieve optimal production management among the involved enterprises. This paper proposes a RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing information tracking infrastructure to address the real-time manufacturing data capturing and manufacturing information processing methods for extended enterprises. Following the proposed infrastructure, the traditional manufacturing resources such as employees, machines and materials are quipped with RFID devices to build the real-time data capturing environment. Then, a series of manufacturing information processing methods such as manufacturing cost, progress, WIP (Work-in-progress) inventory etc. are established to track the real-time manufacturing information of extended enterprises. Finally, a case study is given to demonstrate the presented framework and corresponding methodologies.

This paper discusses the use of complex event processing (CEP) technologies to propose an overall infrastructure for a real-time critical event management system (CEMS). This system allows users to obtain interested and meaningful information from large numbers of primitive events captured from the AUTO-ID devices, such as barcode, RFID and etc, in real time. A hierarchical structure for the critical event definition is proposed in this paper for better understanding of the different event types. The CEMS framework provides an event graphical representation with Petri net for the critical events, allows user to define and edit the critical events easily in an intuitionistic way. A regulatory case is also provided in this paper to demonstrate how the CEMS applies.

Discrete industry (DI) concentrates on a class of business where the production process is basically no material change except the shape and compositions. In such DI workshop, productivity is greatly obstructed by tedious information transferring and management by paper work. This paper proposes a RFID-enabled real-time paperless hardware platform for DI. First, wireless manufacturing devices such as RFID readers are deployed in DI workshop. Then, a wireless communication network is set up. Finally, real-time manufacturing could be achieved according to the reorganization of production. A case study is also introduced in this paper to illustrate how real-time manufacturing works through this platform in DI workshop. Limitations such as channel seeking and universal work flows configuration should be improved if this platform of great merits to extend to other industry.

In this paper, we describe the design of a RFID-enabled container yard management (RFCYM) system in harbour to enhance operational efficiency. Design and fabrication of an active RFID reader and tag for monitoring container is presented. This study demonstrates the feasibility of acquisition of container information using active UHF RFID technology. Finally, we mention the limitations of this study and several future development directions.

Currently, for meeting the Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing requirement in digital plant production, the material delivery is becoming an important issue to be studied which is characterized by real time, accuracy and optimization. Therefore, this paper presents a new kind of real-time optimal material delivery method for digital plant production by utilizing radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In the method, the accurate and visual layout for manufacturing resources included in the digital plant such as manufacturing equipment, RFID devices, forklifts and all kinds of inventories are realized. After real-time locating and tracking the positions of forklifts by utilizing RFID technology and taking the minimal travel distance as the objective, a mathematical model for real-time optimal material delivery in digital plant is established to obtain the optimal travel distances of forklifts. In order to resolve the mathematical model effectively and efficiently, the branch and bound programming model is built. A prototype system of real-time optimal material delivery is developed and the results derived by the implemented numerical case study demonstrate that the proposed method is suitable for forklift route optimization and navigation. Furthermore, with the help of the proposed method, the work-in-progress (WIP) inventories will be reduced and the material delivery will be more timely and accurately which establishes the foundation for implementing JIT manufacturing in digital plant production.

This paper studies organizational learning issues in groups, which can be summarized by the inherent contradiction between « boosting and detecting local innovation » (so that group learns from its entities) and « coding, standardizing and transferring good practices and organizational capabilities » (so as group teaches its entities). This article describes some theoretical mechanisms to solve this “learner/teacher” duality. Then a digital system is proposed to manage and assess locally and globally this organizational learning, illustrated by its use in an automotive supplier group. Finally, new developments are made so as to make the learning system more sustainable.

Even though it is an attractive strategy, Mass customization (MC) is not feasible in all environments, and when it is it presents many challenges to be dealt with. Although the literature presents many methods for implementing MC, none of these presented a structured way for implementing and evaluating such a strategy as a whole, each concentrated on one department or phase of the supply chain or value chain. Implementing MC as a strategy in a company is made in 3 main steps. The first one is deciding on the desired level of MC. The second is planning for the change induced in the whole enterprise by such a strategy, and finally the last by evaluating the implemented strategy and constantly improving it. We suggest in this paper the use of extended value chain modelling and simulation for the second and third steps of MC implementation.