Formulation and Search of Assembly Sequence Design Spaces for Efficient Use of Assembly Plant Resources for New Products

Efficient procedures for generation of feasible assembly sequences and effective utilization of available assembly plant resources can greatly reduce the development time and cost of platforms for new product family members. This article presents a method to generate feasible assembly sequences and an approach to select an assembly process that reduces the existing plant modification cost. Assembly sequence design space is combinatorial in nature. Mathematical models to solve the effects of constraints on these spaces and algorithms to efficiently enumerate feasible spaces are explored in this research. Algorithms to search the feasible space to identify assembly process that can reduce the modification cost of the existing assembly plant can help increase utilization of existing resources. A software application that implements the method and algorithms has been developed. The algorithms use the concept of recursive partitioning of set of components to generate assembly sequence space. The assembly processes are then evaluated to determine the process that maximizes resource utilization for new platforms. The application of the proposed approach is demonstrated using automotive underbody front structure family.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters