CIM implementation in developed and developing countries

Implementing integrated advanced technologies is an effective approach towards solving most problems in today’s competitive global market Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) technologies are presented as a solution to manufacturing organisations which need to perform well. This research describes the major issues and problems facing developing countnes that wish to implement CIM. In this investigation, Libya is taken as an example of a developing country, while Ireland is used as a model of a more developed country, which has already implemented components of the CIM technology in some of its industrial companies. This research demonstrates the effect of CIM technology on Irish industry by investigating the cost effectiveness of implementing CIM, reduction of the production time, reduction of the product cost and management efficiency. To carry out this study, 267 questionnaires were distributed to manufacturing companies in Ireland in order to help establish the status of CIM within manufacturing companies, to study the effect of CIM on Irish industries. To study CIM in Libyan industries, four Libyan companies were investigated to assess the CIM level in their companies and the possibility of implementing CIM technology in Libyan companies as a developing country. The mam findings of this research are that successful implementation of CIM depends on sufficient initial and continued investment from within the country and outside. Furthermore, in order to implement CIM successfully it is vital that there is sufficient expertise and trained workers

A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING ARCHITECTURE AND SYSTEMS DESIGN

This work addresses the problem of finding an improved solution to Computer Integrated Manufacturing (ClM) Architecture and Systems Design. The current approaches are shown to be difficult to understand and use, over complex. In spite of their complexity of approach they lack comprehensiveness and omit many factors and dimensions considered essential for success in today's competitive and often global market place. A new approach to ClM Architecture and Systems Design is presented which offers a simpler, more flexible and more robust format for defining a particular ClM System within a general architectural framework. At the same time this new approach is designed to offer a comprehensive and holistic solution. The research work involved the investigation of current approaches and research and development initiatives focusing particularly on the CIM-OSA and GRAI Integrated methodologies in the field of ClM Architecture. The strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches are examined. Developments in other related fields including manufacturing systems, manufacturing management, information technology and systems generally have been investigated regarding their relevance and possible contribution to an improved solution. The author has built on his practical experience in creating, designing and managing the implementation of a global CIM system. The authors work on several publicly funded collaborative research and development projects relevant to the problem area is described. These include CIM-OSA, IMOCIM and TIQS projects. In the latter two projects the author was instrumental in developing the methodological approach based on a systems approach to business processes in connection with the design of quality and manufacturing systems. Both of these projects have contributed to this work. The author has also participated in the global IMS programme as a rapporteur for the European Commission and this helped to provide a global perspective on the problems of manufacturing companies as they attempt to compete in a world wide market place. The results of this work provide the basis for a radically improved approach to ClM Architecture and Systems Design based on the holistic view of an enterprise. The approach developed supports the business process view of an enterprise; addresses the people and organisational aspects; leads to ClM solutions focused on meeting enterprise goals; and is able to deal with a significantly increased scope and complexity compared with existing methods yet is easily understood and more simple to simple to apply than current approaches

Closing the knowledge gap in Irish manufacturing - a north-south comparison

Knowledge, however defined, is perceived as firms "key" source of competitive advantage and a central determinant of productivity and wealth creation. The value of knowledge as a competitive asset is not intrinsic, but depends instead on its application, i.e. innovation or the transformation of knowledge into new technologies, products and, or services. Therefore, the extent of innovation within an economy depends crucially on the rapid diffusion of new technology and best practice, which it is argued depends in turn on building strong regional networks. So, knowledge, its distribution and diffusion - particularly through the supply chain - form the central focus of this paper. For some economies (e.g. Finland, Israel) with high levels of domestic R&D spending much of the ''new'' knowledge driving local business competitiveness is created domestically. For Ireland, both North and South, however, historically low levels of domestic R&D spending mean that inward technology transfer - primarily associated with inward investment - has been crucial to recent economic development. This suggests two main questions. First, how does the knowledge transferred to Ireland, North and South, through international inward investment compare to international best practice? And, second, to what extent does this knowledge then diffuse to other manufacturing businesses located in Ireland? A third, and related, question concerns the contrasting experiences of Ireland, North and South, particularly given the very different history of inward investment in the two areas. The analysis in the paper is based on data collected through face-to-face interviews with 94 Multi-national enterprise (MNE) plants in the South and North of Ireland. The relatively high response rates achieved and the fact that the final sample coverage resembles relatively closely that of the underlying population suggests that the sample is likely to provide results which are representative of the whole population of large MNE plants in both the South and North of Ireland. The research findings demonstrate that the potential to transfer knowledge from MNE plants to local firms through the supply chain is higher in the South of Ireland than in the North. Yet, Northern suppliers' adoption of a range of best practice techniques lags further behind their MNE plants than in the South. Therefore, larger average knowledge gaps suggest a greater potential benefit from knowledge transfers in the North of Ireland. Yet, while general contact as part of normal trading relations between MNE plants and their suppliers is more common in the North, contact in the South of Ireland is characterised by developmental interactions such as collaboration on product developments and quality assurance systems. Furthermore, southern MNE plants report having had a significantly greater impact on both the performance and the competitiveness of local suppliers than their Northern counterparts.

Query processing of geometric objects with free form boundarie sin spatial databases

The increasing demand for the use of database systems as an integrating factor in CAD/CAM applications has necessitated the development of database systems with appropriate modelling and retrieval capabilities. One essential problem is the treatment of geometric data which has led to the development of spatial databases. Unfortunately, most proposals only deal with simple geometric objects like multidimensional points and rectangles. On the other hand, there has been a rapid development in the field of representing geometric objects with free form curves or surfaces, initiated by engineering applications such as mechanical engineering, aviation or astronautics. Therefore, we propose a concept for the realization of spatial retrieval operations on geometric objects with free form boundaries, such as B-spline or Bezier curves, which can easily be integrated in a database management system. The key concept is the encapsulation of geometric operations in a so-called query processor. First, this enables the definition of an interface allowing the integration into the data model and the definition of the query language of a database system for complex objects. Second, the approach allows the use of an arbitrary representation of the geometric objects. After a short description of the query processor, we propose some representations for free form objects determined by B-spline or Bezier curves. The goal of efficient query processing in a database environment is achieved using a combination of decomposition techniques and spatial access methods. Finally, we present some experimental results indicating that the performance of decomposition techniques is clearly superior to traditional query processing strategies for geometric objects with free form boundaries

PLM in design and engineering education: International perspectives

Technological advances in the last decade have influenced changes in the design and engineering industries on a global scale. Lean and collaborative product development are approaches increasingly adopted by the industry and seen as the core of product lifecycle management. These trends have created the need for new skilled professionals, and universities should adapt their curricula in response. There is an increased need for academia to work with industry in order to meet these challenges. This article reports on the Parametric Technology Corporation Academic Research Symposium held in April 2011. The topics were centred around understanding the essence of product lifecycle management and its impact on design and engineering education. Furthermore, examples of implementing product lifecycle management and collaborative practices in higher education were presented from the United States and France. This article concludes with a discussion of the recommendations made at the symposium for the future development and support of key skills across university curricula

A Survey of Applications and Research in Integrated Design Systems Technology

The initial part of the study was begun with a combination of literature searches, World Wide Web searches, and contacts with individuals and companies who were known to members of our team to have an interest in topics that seemed to be related to our study. There is a long list of such topics, such as concurrent engineering, design for manufacture, life-cycle engineering, systems engineering, systems integration, systems design, design systems, integrated product and process approaches, enterprise integration, integrated product realization, and similar terms. These all capture, at least in part, the flavor of what we describe here as integrated design systems. An inhibiting factor in this inquiry was the absence of agreed terminology for the study of integrated design systems. It is common for the term to be applied to what are essentially augmented Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems, which are integrated only to the extent that agreements have been reached to attach proprietary extensions to proprietary CAD programs. It is also common for some to use the term integrated design systems to mean a system that applies only, or mainly, to the design phase of a product life cycle. It is likewise common for many of the terms listed earlier to be used as synonyms for integrated design systems. We tried to avoid this ambiguity by adopting the definition of integrated design systems that is implied in the introductory notes that we provided to our contacts, cited earlier. We thus arrived at this definition: Integrated Design Systems refers to the integration of the different tools and processes that comprise the engineering, of complex systems. It takes a broad view of the engineering of systems, to include consideration of the entire product realization process and the product life cycle. An important aspect of integrated design systems is the extent to which they integrate existing, "islands of automation" into a comprehensive design and product realization environment. As the study progressed, we relied increasingly upon a networking approach to lead us to new information. The departure point for such searches often was a government-sponsored project or a company initiative. The advantage of this approach was that short conversations with knowledgeable persons would usually cut through confusion over differences of terminology, thereby somewhat reducing the search space of the study. Even so, it was not until late in our eight-month inquiry that we began to see signs of convergence of the search, in the sense that a number of the latest inquiries began to turn up references to earlier contacts. As suggested above, this convergence often occurred with respect to particular government or company projects

Performance comparison of point and spatial access methods

In the past few years a large number of multidimensional point access methods, also called multiattribute index structures, has been suggested, all of them claiming good performance. Since no performance comparison of these structures under arbitrary (strongly correlated nonuniform, short "ugly") data distributions and under various types of queries has been performed, database researchers and designers were hesitant to use any of these new point access methods. As shown in a recent paper, such point access methods are not only important in traditional database applications. In new applications such as CAD/CIM and geographic or environmental information systems, access methods for spatial objects are needed. As recently shown such access methods are based on point access methods in terms of functionality and performance. Our performance comparison naturally consists of two parts. In part I we w i l l compare multidimensional point access methods, whereas in part I I spatial access methods for rectangles will be compared. In part I we present a survey and classification of existing point access methods. Then we carefully select the following four methods for implementation and performance comparison under seven different data files (distributions) and various types of queries: the 2-level grid file, the BANG file, the hB-tree and a new scheme, called the BUDDY hash tree. We were surprised to see one method to be the clear winner which was the BUDDY hash tree. It exhibits an at least 20 % better average performance than its competitors and is robust under ugly data and queries. In part I I we compare spatial access methods for rectangles. After presenting a survey and classification of existing spatial access methods we carefully selected the following four methods for implementation and performance comparison under six different data files (distributions) and various types of queries: the R-tree, the BANG file, PLOP hashing and the BUDDY hash tree. The result presented two winners: the BANG file and the BUDDY hash tree. This comparison is a first step towards a standardized testbed or benchmark. We offer our data and query files to each designer of a new point or spatial access method such that he can run his implementation in our testbed