Design for assembly automation (DFAA) is an important part of the concurrent engineering strategy for reduction of product manufacturing costs and lead times. An intelligent knowledge-based system (KBS) for design for automation and early cost modelling within a concurrent engineering environment has been developed. This paper focuses upon the development of the design for an assembly automatio...

Designing robust end-effector plays a crucial role in performance of a robot workcell. Design automation of industrial grippers’ fingers/jaws is therefore of the highest interest in the robot industry. This paper systematically reviews the enormous studies performed in relevant research areas for finger design automation. Key processes for successfully achieving automatic finger design are iden...

Wireless automation is an emerging field of research, engineering and industrial development that aims at significant savings in installation times and costs of cabling in automation systems, while providing a new level of flexibility for system design, reconfiguration, and agility. It is applicable to both new automation systems and retrofit applications. The use of wireless technologies is ra...

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern building automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex building automation syst...

Recent developments in several emerging fields enable us to think of the fields of prototype for robotics and automation in new ways and to consider new applications. Today, besides introducing the intelligence directly into equipments/systems through embedded microcomputers and providing virtual prototyping through enhanced CAD/CAE facilities, information flow has been well regarded as an esse...

This paper presents the practical experience gained in the process of implementing the human-centered automation design methodology to an electric power utility management automation function, along with the analytical discussions on the implementation challenges. This report of implementation challenges and the discussions made on the methods devised to conquer those challenges lead to an alte...

Operators and domain practitioners often complain that automation is brittle, opaque, and ‘not worth the effort’ to use. This paper reviews automation problems and methods for the design of ‘cognitive automation.’ Cognitive automation is software intended to automate cognitive activities, such as situation assessment, monitoring, and fault management, that are currently performed by human opera...

Technical developments in computer hardware and software now make it possible to introduce automation into virtually all aspects of human-machine systems. Given these technical capabilities, which system functions should be automated and to what extent? We outline a model for types and levels of automation that provides a framework and an objective basis for making such choices. Appropriate sel...

This paper is about describing and analysing modelling practices in automotive industry and electronics design. Based on ethnographic observations in modelling sessions in three case studies, we tried to describe the modelling scope in real work environments. This helped to identify problem areas or areas of change, articulation work in decision making activities during modelling, models as sha...