The manufacturing cell design problem aims at organizing a manufacturing plant in cells that contain machines processing parts from a same family for a given product. The purpose is to minimize the flow of parts among cells so as to increase productivity while reducing costs. This paper focuses on comparing metaheuristics and constraint programming –from a modeling standpoint– when used to solv...

Key problems in manufacturing plant control, modeling and information management, enterprise integration and interoperability, and large-scale complex systems are described. Recent major accomplishments in developing solution methods and tools are reviewed in e-Manufacturing, e-Service, and bio-inspired manufacturing and control; Real-time, cooperative/collaborative enterprises; autonomous, col...

The origins of MES systems go back to early ‘80s, when MES concept was still connected to Data Collection System. Many companies, in fact, used a data collection system belonging to CIM Model 1 for an integrated manufacturing model. As years go by and with the change of industries’ needs due to an increasing globalization and more specific customer demands, the necessity to create a new model (...

Flexible manufacturing is a relatively new concept in manufacturing where the plant is given many different types of products in very small lot sizes to manufacture. This type of highly flexible manufacturing plant is dynamically changing at a must faster pace than traditional manufacturing plants. As such new highly adaptive planning algorithms have been studied in the attempt to utilize the f...

Documentation for a manufacturing system can range from a few hundred pages for a medium sized industrial machine-tool to many thousands of individual manuals together with supporting drawings for a complete manufacturing plant. With this volume of information, and the change to multi-skilling of personnel within many industrial plants, a number of problems with conventional information retriev...

A key problem in the manufacture of highlycustomized products is the synthesis of controllers able to manufacture any instance of a given product type on a given production or assembly line. In this paper, we extend classical AI behavior composition to manufacturing settings. We first introduce a novel solution concept for manufacturing composition, target production processes, that are able to...

This paper documents the relationship between capital intensity, the use of advanced manufacturing technology, growth rates, and exit probabilities for a sample of U.S. manufacturing plants. It utilizes data from a unique establishment survey of technology usage that allows us to control for both the quantity and heterogeneity of capital in the plant. The main findings are that capital-intensiv...

BACKGROUND Animal and clinical studies with plant-produced single-chain variable fragment lymphoma vaccines have demonstrated specific immunogenicity and safety. However, the expression levels of such fragments were highly variable and required complex engineering of the linkers. Moreover, the downstream processing could not be built around standard methods like protein A affinity capture. DE...

Part A Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering Chap. 1 Mathematics for Engineers 2 Mechanics B Applications in 3 Materials Science and Technology 4 Thermodynamics 5 Tribology 6 Design Machine Elements 7 Manufacturing 8 Measuring Quality Control 9 10 Piston Machines 11 Pressure Vessels Heat Exchangers 12 Turbomachinery 13 Transportation Systems 14 Construction Earth Moving Equipment 15 Enterprise...

The manufacturing environment is becoming increasingly dynamic with upsurges in electronic-commerce, supply chain management, forecasting, and procurement and resource planning. It also includes trends toward more process data acquisition and analysis, shorter production runs, and more stringent quality requirements. These drivers lead to an opportunity for companies to collect and use informat...