16,745 research outputs found

    Adopting Product Modularity in House Building to Support Mass Customisation

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    Product modularity is a concept that can contribute to the improvement of product quality and production efficiency in house-building. However, there is a lack of consensus in the literature on the concepts that define product modularity. Furthermore, little attention has been given to the differences between building construction and manufacturing, for which product modularity was originally developed. This research aims to address that gap by adapting the conceptualization of product modularity so that it can effectively be used in the house-building industry. The methodological approach adopted in this study was Design Science Research, and two empirical studies were carried out on construction companies based in Brazil and in the U.K. Those studies are used to illustrate the applicability and utility of the proposed concepts and tools. Research findings indicate that the adoption of product modularity concepts results in benefits to both traditional construction technologies and prefabricated building systems

    Manufacturing Value Modelling, Flexibility, and Sustainability: from theoretical definition to empirical validation

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    The aim of this PhD thesis is to investigate the relevance of flexibility and sustainability within the smart manufacturing environment and understand if they could be adopted as emerging competitive dimensions and help firms to take decisions and delivering value

    Innovation in sustainable manufacturing education

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    Part of: Seliger, Günther (Ed.): Innovative solutions : proceedings / 11th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing, Berlin, Germany, 23rd - 25th September, 2013. - Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2013. - ISBN 978-3-7983-2609-5 (online). - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:83-opus4-40276. - pp. 9-16.Sustainable value creation entails generating value for all stakeholders from economic, environmental and social perspectives. In a manufacturing context, creating sustainable value requires product, process and systems level innovations to enable near-perpetual closed-loop material flow across multiple life-cycles; it also requires understanding the complex interactions of the socio-technical systems with the natural environment for emergent synthesis so sustainable value creation can occur harmoniously and continuously. However, current educational curricula with traditional disciplines is fragmented and do not represent the multidisciplinarity or the integration needs; it is now necessary to work at the interface of the various disciplines to address the complex issues that are brought about through sustainability. Thus, to create sustainable value through sustainable manufacturing will require transformational and innovative reforms in education with an overall paradigm shift to provide the future generation of engineers, scientists and managers the necessary technical knowledge, skills and capabilities. This paper presents recent trends in developing such innovative educational programs in sustainable manufacturing. Also, the technological challenges posed by the need for implementing viable innovative sustainable manufacturing educational programs inevitably require fundamental studies on total life-cycle products, closed-loop manufacturing processes and integrated production systems extending beyond to the entire supply chain operations. This paper is aimed at tackling these significant challenges by essentially developing sustainable value propositions for all forms of educational programs (formal degrees and certificate level programs, professional/continuing education programs, short courses and web-based interactive learning programs, etc.) to incorporate the new knowledge needed to promote value-added sustainable manufacturing at product, process and system levels

    A Stackelberg game theoretic model for optimizing product family architecting with supply chain consideration

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    Planning of an optimal product family architecture (PFA) plays a critical role in defining an organization's product platforms for product variant configuration while leveraging commonality and variety. The focus of PFA planning has been traditionally limited to the product design stage, yet with limited consideration of the downstream supply chain-related issues. Decisions of supply chain configuration have a profound impact on not only the end cost of product family fulfillment, but also how to design the architecture of module configuration within a product family. It is imperative for product family architecting to be optimized in conjunction with supply chain configuration decisions. This paper formulates joint optimization of PFA planning and supply chain configuration as a Stackelberg game. A nonlinear, mixed integer bilevel programming model is developed to deal with the leader–follower game decisions between product family architecting and supply chain configuration. The PFA decision making is represented as an upper-level optimization problem for optimal selection of the base modules and compound modules. A lower-level optimization problem copes with supply chain decisions in accordance with the upper-level decisions of product variant configuration. Consistent with the bilevel optimization model, a nested genetic algorithm is developed to derive near optimal solutions for PFA and the corresponding supply chain network. A case study of joint PFA and supply chain decisions for power transformers is reported to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed Stackelberg game theoretic joint optimization of PFA and supply chain decisions

    The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

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    An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

    Stage Configuration for Capital Goods:Supporting Order Capturing in Mass Customization

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    Monitor 2019; the regional food chain:food from the region for the region - cooperative and innovative

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