Green Technologies for Production Processes

This book focuses on original research works about Green Technologies for Production Processes, including discrete production processes and process production processes, from various aspects that tackle product, process, and system issues in production. The aim is to report the state-of-the-art on relevant research topics and highlight the barriers, challenges, and opportunities we are facing. This book includes 22 research papers and involves energy-saving and waste reduction in production processes, design and manufacturing of green products, low carbon manufacturing and remanufacturing, management and policy for sustainable production, technologies of mitigating CO2 emissions, and other green technologies

Differential pricing integrated with multi-product, multi-machine, multi-worker cost function for resource service providers in cloud manufacturing

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) platform offers an open marketplace, where a Resource Service Provider (RSP) can benefit from Price Discrimination (PD) in return for specific services. However, the literature focused mainly on operator-based pricing and overlooked RSP pricing control. Therefore, this study formulates a profit function in which revenue is enhanced by adjusting prices according to customer types, while cost accounting is done by resource allocation based Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA) because MFCA provides a comprehensive guideline towards waste minimization. The proposed model is formulated into MINLP problem with multiple factors such as; part types, batch size, part routes, machine types, energy consumption, worker types and material handling cost as well as price sensitive customer behaviour and demand. Further, ANOVA is applied for factors analysis. The results suggests that customer types and demand are positively correlated, while parts, machines, and worker types are negatively correlated with profit. The model is also compared with reference price effect and fixed pricing strategy. Results validate that to benefit from diverse customer behaviour in CMfg, PD along with optimal resource allocation provides an effective solution for profit maximization. Model is also compared with reference price effect and fixed pricing strategy to validate its effectiveness

Cloud Manufacturing Model to Optimise Manufacturing Performance

Being predicted as the future of modern manufacturing, cloud-based manufacturing has drawn the attention of researchers in academia and industry. Researches are being done towards transforming every service in to cloud based service-oriented manufacturing mode in the manufacturing industry. There are many challenges that would arise when travelling towards this paradigm shift which is being addressed by researchers, but there are very few researches that concentrate on the elastic capability of cloud. Elastic capability makes this paradigm unique from all the other approaches or technologies. If elasticity is not achievable then the necessity of migrating to cloud is unnecessary. So, it is imperative to identify if at all it is necessary to adopt cloud-based manufacturing mode and discuss the issues and challenges that would arise to achieve elasticity when shifting to this emerging manufacturing paradigm. This research explores the importance of adopting cloud-based manufacturing mode to improve manufacturing performance based on the competitive priorities such as cost, quality, delivery and flexibility and proposes an elasticity assessment tool to be included in the cloud-based manufacturing model for the users to assess the challenges and issues on the realisation of elasticity on the context of manufacturing, which is the novelty of this research. The contribution to knowledge is a clear understanding of the necessity of cloud based elastic manufacturing model in the manufacturing environment for the manufacturing SMEs to gain a competitive advantage by achieving the competitive priorities such as low-cost, high-quality, and on-time delivery. Finally, the research suggests the best combination of manufacturing parameters that has to be emphasised to improve the manufacturing performance and gain a competitive advantage

Planning and Scheduling Optimization

Although planning and scheduling optimization have been explored in the literature for many years now, it still remains a hot topic in the current scientific research. The changing market trends, globalization, technical and technological progress, and sustainability considerations make it necessary to deal with new optimization challenges in modern manufacturing, engineering, and healthcare systems. This book provides an overview of the recent advances in different areas connected with operations research models and other applications of intelligent computing techniques used for planning and scheduling optimization. The wide range of theoretical and practical research findings reported in this book confirms that the planning and scheduling problem is a complex issue that is present in different industrial sectors and organizations and opens promising and dynamic perspectives of research and development