Design function deployment: a concurrent engineering design system

The current state of activities in the design and manufacturing industry is marked by the various CAD/CAM/CAE systems which exist as islands of automation, and are used by engineers and designers in a non-integrated and ill-structured way. Thus the design problem is examined from separate and different perspectives, rather than as a whole. The goal of this research, is to develop a comprehensive, integrated and generic design system, that will ensure the realisation of concurrent engineering in practice. To this end, Design Function Deployment (DFD) has been developed. DFD enables the capture of customers' requirements, the establishment of design specifications and constraints in a solution neutral form, the generation of conceptual designs (architectures), the development of detailed designs layouts), the selection of materials and associated manufacturing processes and the development of suitable production plans. The generated design solutions are optimised against a composite set of multi-criteria (attributes) in a concurrent manner for key factors such as performance, robustness and cost as well as other life cycle issues (manufacture, assembly, serviceability, reliability, environment, etc) in order to choose the most satisfying design. DFD provides a recipe of design methods to support the designer or design team at any stage of the design process. The optimisation process involves the use of these supporting design tools (methods) encapsulated within it. DFD also provides an integrated product modelling environment which integrates both textual and geometric design information, and enables the capture of other design information related to design intent, rationale and history. The research that led to the evolution and development of DFD involved (a) a detailed investigation and research on Quality Function Deployment, QFD, a technique well suited for capturing and translating customer requirements into design specifications, (b) an extensive review of design philosophies, models, methods and systems and (c) an extensive investigation into concurrent engineering. The findings of this research has led to the development of the structure of the DFD system, which incorporates (1) a prescriptive design model, (2) a suite of design methods and (3) supporting knowledge/rulebases and databases, which are used for the generation of the design solution space and the optimal selection of the most satisfying design for subsequent implementation

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Micro/Nano Manufacturing

Micro manufacturing involves dealing with the fabrication of structures in the size range of 0.1 to 1000 µm. The scope of nano manufacturing extends the size range of manufactured features to even smaller length scales—below 100 nm. A strict borderline between micro and nano manufacturing can hardly be drawn, such that both domains are treated as complementary and mutually beneficial within a closely interconnected scientific community. Both micro and nano manufacturing can be considered as important enablers for high-end products. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences is dedicated to recent advances in research and development within the field of micro and nano manufacturing. The included papers report recent findings and advances in manufacturing technologies for producing products with micro and nano scale features and structures as well as applications underpinned by the advances in these technologies