4,244 research outputs found
Cloud-based manufacturing-as-a-service environment for customized products
This paper describes the paradigm of cloud-based services which are used to envisage a new generation of configurable manufacturing systems. Unlike previous approaches to mass customization (that simply reprogram individual machines to produce specific shapes) the system reported here is intended to enable the customized production of technologically complex products by dynamically configuring a manufacturing supply chain. In order to realize such a system, the resources (i.e. production capabilities) have to be designed to support collaboration throughout the whole production network, including their adaption to customer-specific production. The flexible service composition as well as the appropriate IT services required for its realization show many analogies with common cloud computing approaches. For this reason, this paper describes the motivation and challenges that are related to cloud-based manufacturing and illustrates emerging technologies supporting this vision byestablishing an appropriate Manufacturing-as-a-Service environment based on manufacturing service descriptions
Implementing Mass Customization Using SAP Variant Configuration and a 3D Printer
The process of manufacturing customized products at the efficiency of mass production is called mass customization manufacturing. In order to implement mass customization a product configurator, a well-planned configurable product platform and a flexible manufacturing technology are essential. As 3D printers are becoming more and more popular it is evident that they act as very flexible factories that could manufacture any object. This thesis tries to find out how 3D printers and product configurators could be combined to implement mass customization manufacturing. The system created in this thesis manufactures configurable motorcycles whose configuration model is maintained in SAP-ERP system. A product configurator built using SAP Variant configuration allows the user to configure a variant of the motorcycle according to their needs using the configuration model. This configured variant is manufactured using a 3D printer. Qualitative methods are used to gain knowledge and understanding about mass customization and SAP Variant configuration from books, scientific articles and software development forums. Using this knowledge the system is implemented which could manufacture approximately 23 different types of motorcycles customized by the user. The users who configure and manufacture the motorcycles also get hands-on knowledge about basic business processes in SAP ERP related to production planning (PP) and logistics (LO) modules and understand how information flows in the ERP system with respect to mass customized manufacturing.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format
Beyond XSPEC: Towards Highly Configurable Analysis
We present a quantitative comparison between software features of the defacto
standard X-ray spectral analysis tool, XSPEC, and ISIS, the Interactive
Spectral Interpretation System. Our emphasis is on customized analysis, with
ISIS offered as a strong example of configurable software. While noting that
XSPEC has been of immense value to astronomers, and that its scientific core is
moderately extensible--most commonly via the inclusion of user contributed
"local models"--we identify a series of limitations with its use beyond
conventional spectral modeling. We argue that from the viewpoint of the
astronomical user, the XSPEC internal structure presents a Black Box Problem,
with many of its important features hidden from the top-level interface, thus
discouraging user customization. Drawing from examples in custom modeling,
numerical analysis, parallel computation, visualization, data management, and
automated code generation, we show how a numerically scriptable, modular, and
extensible analysis platform such as ISIS facilitates many forms of advanced
astrophysical inquiry.Comment: Accepted by PASP, for July 2008 (15 pages
A Survey on Process Variants Meta-modelling Approaches
This paper introduces the concept of process variants in process-aware
information systems (PAIS) during the design-time phase, where multiple
variants of a single process must be specified. Today's organizations have to
manage multiple variants of a given process, such as multiple order processes
or payment processes for a specific product or service they offer. Traditional
business process management tools lack in adequately capture and represent
explicitly these variants. Hence, for more than a decade an array of approaches
have been proposed to tackle this gap. A reference or customizable process
model has been introduced to model these variants collections in a way that
each variant could be derived by inserting/removing an activity according to a
process context. This survey reviews current literature by providing an
overview of meta-modelling approaches that have been extended in order to
capture the variations of business processes. Moreover, we give a comparative
analysis of these approaches based on different criteria we identified from the
inventory activity, providing insights into their strengths and limitations.
This paper concludes that current approaches to process variants meta-modelling
provide a comprehensive view of the conceptual level of process variants and
the control-flow process perspective. While some approaches go a step further
by capturing variability in resources or specialization among
activities/processes
An extended configurable UML activity diagram and a transformation algorithm for business process reference modeling
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions provide generic off-the-shelf reference models usually known as best practices . The configuration !individualization of the reference model to meet specific requirements of business end users however, is a difficult task. The available modeling languages do not provide a complete configurable language that could be used to model configurable reference models. More specifically, there is no algorithm that monitors the transformation of configurable UML Activity Diagram (AD) models while preserving the syntactic correctness of the model. To fill these gaps we propose an extended UML AD modeling language which we named Configurable UML Activity Diagram (C-UML AD). The C-UML AD is used to represent a reference model while showing all the variation points and corresponding dependencies within the model. The C-UML AD covers the requirements and attributes of a configurable modeling language as prescribed by earlier researchers who developed Configurable EPC (C-EPC). We also propose a complete algorithm that transforms the C-UML AD business model to an individual consistent UML AD business model, where the end user\u27s configuration values are consistent with the constraints of the model. Meanwhile, the syntactic correctness of the transformed model is preserved. We validated the Transformation Algorithm by showing how all the transformation steps of the algorithm preserve the syntactic correctness of any given configurable business model, as prescribed by earlier researchers, and by running it on different sets of test scenarios to demonstrate its correctness. We developed a tool to apply the Transformation Algorithm and to demonstrate its validity on a set of test cases as well as a real case study that was used by earlier researchers who developed the C-EPC
The Configurable SAT Solver Challenge (CSSC)
It is well known that different solution strategies work well for different
types of instances of hard combinatorial problems. As a consequence, most
solvers for the propositional satisfiability problem (SAT) expose parameters
that allow them to be customized to a particular family of instances. In the
international SAT competition series, these parameters are ignored: solvers are
run using a single default parameter setting (supplied by the authors) for all
benchmark instances in a given track. While this competition format rewards
solvers with robust default settings, it does not reflect the situation faced
by a practitioner who only cares about performance on one particular
application and can invest some time into tuning solver parameters for this
application. The new Configurable SAT Solver Competition (CSSC) compares
solvers in this latter setting, scoring each solver by the performance it
achieved after a fully automated configuration step. This article describes the
CSSC in more detail, and reports the results obtained in its two instantiations
so far, CSSC 2013 and 2014
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