Digital Machines, Space, And Time: Towards A Behavioral Perspective Of Flexible Manufacturing

Recently, the diffusion of digital machines has further enhanced firms’ manufacturing flexibility, but also opened questions on potential challenges and implications in the production process. To respond to these timely issues, we adopt a behavioral perspective and comparatively explore how four different types of digital machines—characterized by increasing degrees of manufacturing flexibility—affect the perception and use of space and time for routines within the production plant. We qualitatively observe and compare 45 digital manufacturing machines, sampled across 14 firms in the British and Italian motorsport industry. A model emerges where four key mechanisms reshape the ‘space-machine’ and ‘time-machine’ routines. Such mechanisms mediate the relationship between manufacturing flexibility and firm performance. Further, we show how increasing digitalization in the manufacturing process enhances the establishment of new routines as flexible machines get introduced in the production. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications related to fostering a behavioral perspective in innovation and operations management studies

Big fish, big pond? The joint effect of formal and informal core-periphery positions on the generation of incremental innovations

In this paper, we apply a core/periphery framework to an intraorganizational context to study the interplay between formal and informal core/periphery structures. Specifically, we consider how core positions occupied by inventors in the corporate research and development division of a large multinational high-tech company affect their ability to generate incremental innovations. We theorize and empirically observe that formal and informal core positions have positive and independent effects on the generation of incremental innovations. These effects have a multiplicative impact on innovative productivity when inventors who are core in the informal knowledge-sharing network are also affiliated with a core organizational unit. We also observe, however, that the positive effect of being located at the core of both the informal and formal structures is negatively moderated by individuals’ distribution of knowledge ties when these reach outside the core of their informal knowledge-sharing network

Design of Distributed Unique Words for Enhanced Frame Synchronization.

A novel approach is introduced for the design of a unique word (UW) for frame synchronization in time division multiplexing/time division multiple access (TDM/TDMA) systems. In particular, the UW symbols are distributed in each frame in a specific pattern in order to optimize the UW autocorrelation properties. The distribution patterns are scalable, since they preserve their autocorrelation properties under truncation. The resulting frame structure enables the use of several types of UWs, including the silent-UW (SUW) and the unit-UW (UUW), that are novel approaches for which the optimal Bayes detector is derived. An analytical performance characterization is presented along with comparisons with state-of-the-art alternatives. We show that SUW can significantly outperform the classic UW in the presence of frequency offsets or whenever data interference is the main impairment to cope with, i.e. at moderate to high signal to noise ratios. Interestingly, this performance improvement comes with the further advantage of a considerable complexity reduction. Hence UUW is shown to provide both performance improvement and complexity reduction

Frame Synchronization at the Sound of Silence

A novel approach is introduced for the design of the Unique Word (UW) to be inserted into TDM/TDMA systems for frame synchronization purposes. In particular, the UW is composed by all zero symbols, that are distributed along the frame in order to improve the autocorrelation properties. The resulting UW is identified as Silent-UW (S-UW). We show in this paper that S-UW leads to an optimum detector with very limited complexity, and with performance that can be significantly better than the classic UW in the presence of frequency offsets or at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios. A fully analytical performance characterization is presented reporting also comparisons with state-of-the-art alternatives

Ephemeris Interpolation Techniques for Assisted GNSS Services

Assisted-GNSS (A-GNSS) is an interesting technology that can consistently improve positioning performance and reduce terminal complexity. One of the possible data that the A-GNSS can provide is the satellite orbit (satellite ephemeris) necessary to determine the user position starting from pseudorange measurements. In this paper, we propose two novel data structures for the transmission of ephemeris through the assistance network. It is shown that, adopting different interpolation techniques, it is possible to consistently reduce the amount of data to be transmitted and extend the ephemeris validity to 24 hours