A Virtual factory data model as a support tool for the simulation of manufacturing systems

The design of a manufacturing systems is a complex and critical activity entailing decisions with an impact on a long time horizon and a major commitment of financial resources. Indeed, the modelling, simulation and evaluation of manufacturing systems are relevant activities both in the design and the operational phases of a factory. This paper grounds on the results of the Virtual Factory Framework (VFF) Project and addresses the use of an ontology based model of a production system to support the construction of a performance evaluation model

A guideline for planning and implementing an action-based and transnational course in higher engineering education: A Case for Sustainable Value Creation

This paper outlines a generic guideline for planning and implementing an action-based and transnational course in higher education for training the engineering competencies required in a future dynamic European workplace and economy. This guidance is intended for universities, research and teaching institutes, as well as for companies interested in establishing novel teaching concepts by closing the gap between know-how and experience. The guideline will provide suggestions and lessons learned for the realization of an efficient and effective implementation. Important development phases of the guideline are explained through a use case based on a master course, which has been jointly established in cooperation by four European universities. Learning objectives for this course aim at raising the awareness about sustainable value creation by focusing on the development of sustainable and technological innovations with entrepreneurial objectives

A mathematical foundation to support bidirectional mappings between digital models: an application of multi-scale modelling in manufacturing

With manufacturing going through the Industry 4.0 revolution, a vast amount of data and information exchange leads to an increase in complexity of digitized manufacturing systems. To tackle such complexity, one solution is to design and operate a digital twin model under different levels of abstraction, with different levels of detail, according to the available information and scope of the model. To support efficient, coherent and stable information flows between models with different levels of detail, a mathematical structure, called a delta lens, has been explored and developed to support rigorous bidirectional transitions between the models. To support different types of abstractions in manufacturing, a hybrid delta lens has been proposed and its formal representation is developed to support the generalization of its structure and properties. Benefits of the proposed hybrid delta lenses are demonstrated through an application to an industrial case to support the modelling of an automatic, high-throughput assembly line

Sustainable engineering master module - Insights from three cohorts of European engineering team

Mobility and transnational migration are current social developments among the population of the European Union. These developments in both society-at-large and companies, linked to the challenges of sustainability, lead to new requirements for working in the European Union. Teaching and learning in higher education needs to adapt to these requirements. As a result, new and innovative teaching and learning practices in higher education should provide competencies for transnational teamwork in the curriculum of tomorrow's engineers in order to ensure their competitiveness in the job market. A transnational project-oriented teaching and learning framework, which provides the future key competencies for young engineers was implemented in the course European Engineering Team (EET). Engineering students from four countries participated in a new project-based course that focused on the development of innovative and sustainable products and opportunities. The goal of this paper is to present results and lessons learnt from three cohorts of EET

Classifying Web sites and Web pages: the use of metrics and URL characteristics as markers

Points to the way in which computer scientists and librarians working with the World Wide Web are turning to traditional library and information science techniques, such as cataloguing and classification, to bring order to the chaos of the Web. Explores cataloguing opportunities offered by the ephemeral nature of materials on the Web and examines several of the latter’s unique characteristics. Suggests the coupling of automated filtering and measuring to the Web record cataloguing process, with particular reference to the ephemeral nature of Web documents and the ability to measure Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Web document characteristics and migrate them to catalogue records using automated procedures. Reports results of an ongoing longitudinal study of 361 randomly selected Web pages and their Web sites, the data being collected weekly using the Flashsite 1.01 software package. Four basic approaches to ordering information on the Web were studied: postcoordinate keyword and full-text indexes; application of both precoordinate and postcoordinate filters or identifiers to the native document by either authors or indexers; use of thesauri and other classification schemes; and bibliometric techniques employing mapping of hypertext links and other citation systems. Concludes that off-the-shelf technology exists that allows the monitoring of Web sites and Web pages to ‘measure’ Web page and Web site characteristics, to process quantified changes, and to write those changes to bibliographic records. Capturing semantic or meaningful change is more complex, but these can be approximated using existing software.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

A branch-and-bound approach to schedule a no-wait flow shop to minimize the CVaR of the residual work content

The aerospace industry ranks among the largest manufacturing industries in the world facing a significant growing phase as well as an increased competition. This paper addresses the scheduling of a set of jobs in a paced assembly line in presence of uncertainty affecting the availability of production resources, stemming from the assembly process in the aircraft manufacturing industry. The production problem is modeled as a no-wait paced permutation flow shop and solved providing a robust scheduling solution minimizing the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of the residual work content, i.e., the amount of workload that cannot be completed during the cycle time in the stations, due to a lack of available resources. A branch-and-bound approach is developed and applied to randomly generated instances as well as to an industrial problem related to the production of aircrafts

A Robust Scheduling Framework for Re-Manufacturing Activities of Turbine Blades

Refurbished products are gaining importance in many industrial sectors, specifically high-value products whose residual value is relevant and guarantee the economic viability of the re-manufacturing at an industrial level, e.g., turbine blades for power generation. In this paper, we address the robust scheduling scheme of re-manufacturing activities for turbine blades. Parts entering the process may have very different wear states or presence of defects. Thus, the repair process is affected by a significant degree of uncertainty. The paper investigates the uncertainties and discusses how they affect the scheduling performance of the re-manufacturing system. We then present a robust scheduling framework for the re-manufacturing scheduling strategies, policies, and methods. This framework is based on a wide variety of experimental and practical approaches in the re-manufacturing scheduling area, which will be a guideline for the planning and scheduling of re-manufacturing activities of turbine blades. A case study approach was adopted to examine how re-manufacturers design their scheduling strategies

A Markovian Approach for Stochastic Scheduling in Manufacturing-to-Order Production Systems to Support Due Date Quoting

In the production of complex Manufacturing-to-Order products, uncertainty may stem from a number of possible sources, both internal and external, affecting the execution of the scheduled production activities. A disrupted schedule could incur high costs due to missed due dates, resource idleness, or higher work-in-process inventory. Academic research has investigated robust scheduling approaches trying to assure adequate average performance but, at the same time, robust scheduling must also be able to provide a balanced compromise between expected profit and the protection against extremely unfavorable events having a low occurrence probability. Tackling this problem entails being able of estimating the probability distribution associated with a scheduling objective function. In this paper we propose a markovian approach to estimate the distribution of the completion time of a network of activities with generic stochastic durations. This estimation can serve as a support to the decisions related to the negotiation of due dates with the customers and to the allocation of the inventory budget. The proposed approach is applied to a real industrial case in the machining tool sector