Flexible manufacturing and customization is a considerable topic in modern manufacturing automobile industry. However, challenges still remain on the responsiveness of production system to the fluctuation of production demand. In this paper we developed a flexible machine layout that is not restricted to equal size machines. The layout optimizes the trade-offs between increased material handlin...

Super-Arrhenius relaxation rates in glassy materials can be associated with thermally activated rearrangements of increasing numbers of molecules at decreasing temperatures. We explore a model of such a mechanism in which stringlike fluctuations in the neighborhood of shear transformation zones provide routes along which rearrangements can propagate, and the entropy associated with critically l...

The synthesis of the compound that has been proposed to be the natural product sclerophytin F has been completed from a known vinylogous carbonate. The synthetic strategy relied upon rearrangement of a catalytically generated ylide-like intermediate to produce an oxabicyclo[6.2.1]-5-undecen-9-one and an intermolecular Diels-Alder reaction to construct the complete tricyclic core found in the na...

Several tasks that autonomous service robots will be expected to do involve changing material objects by cutting or separating parts, then rearranging them to obtain assemblages satisfying certain properties. In this paper we describe a system to represent and reason about entities that disappear or are created by the robot through such actions. Entities are grounded in objects that the robot c...

A solid-phase synthesis protocol was used to prepare fifteen new linear tetra-, and penta-esters structurally related to an active lead compound. The structures were assembled from three types of hydroxyl protected building blocks: monoalkyl esters of hydroxyglutaric acid, omega-hydroxyacids, and alpha-hydroxymethylalkanoic acids. The standard methodology gave acceptable quantities of material ...

A dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is concerned with finding a set of facility layouts across multiple time periods that minimizes the total cost of material flows and rearrangement costs. Unlike other heuristic approaches that focus mainly on the searching aspect, this research takes another approach by streamlining the data structure of solution representation to improve the solution sw...

Developmentally regulated V(D)J recombination profoundly influences immune repertoires, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. In the endogenous T cell receptor Cgamma1 cluster, the 3' Vgamma3 gene (closest to Jgamma1) rearranges preferentially in the fetal period whereas rearrangement of the 5' Vgamma2 gene predominates in the adult. Reversing the positions of the Vgamma2 and Vga...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usefulness of morphologic diagnosis, immunophenotyping and immunoglobulin (Ig) and T-cell receptor (TcR) gene rearrangement studies in the diagnosis of lymphoproliferative disorder. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study with clinical follow-up of controversial cases. SETTING Single institution, tertiary care centre. PATIENTS All 273 patients whose lymphoid tissue s...