Configuration flexibility and deadlock-free operation are two essential properties of control systems for highly automated flexible manufacturing systems. Configuration flexibility, the ability to quickly modify manufacturing system components and their logical relationships, requires automatic generation of control executables from high level system specifications. These control executables mu...

The time for electronically connecting business and manufacturing has come. Advancements in e-commerce have requested that business decisions on web be the direct driving info to the corresponding manufacturing activities without human interventions. Since orders from the web may arrive in random sequence and with a range of specifications, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) may be the proper...

Combining the advantages of layered manufacturing and material removal processes, additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (A/S SFF) can build parts with complex shapes without compromising precision requirements. However, preparing material removal operations requires special expertise, which has in fact become one of the bottlenecks of the A/S SFF manufacturing process. To achieve auto...

Automatic in-process data collection techniques have been widely used in complicated manufacturing processes in recent years. The huge amounts of product measurement data created great opportunity for process monitoring and diagnosis. Given such product quality measurements, this article examines the diagnosability of the process faults in a multistage manufacturing process using a linear mixed...

As minimum feature sizes shrink into the deep-subwavelength range, manufacturing becomes increasingly diJ~cult, and the costs and complexity of standard cell ASIC design become prohibitive for all but the highest-volume products. Many manufacturing diJ3~culties owe to the irregularity of standard cellbased design; therefore, design using more regular logic fabrics becomes an attractive alternat...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies provide automatic and accurate object data capturing capability and enable real-time object visibility and traceability. Potential benefits have been widely reported for improving manufacturing shop-floor management. However, reports on how such potentials come true in real-life shopfloor daily operations are very limited. As a result, skeptics...

We propose a research agenda to investigate programming language techniques for improving affordable, end-user desktop manufacturing processes such as 3D printing. Our goal is to adapt programming languages tools and extend the decades of research in industrial, high-end CAD/CAM in order to help make affordable desktop manufacturing processes more accurate, fast, reliable, and accessible to end...

The high resolution of digital cameras has made single-shot, single-sensor acquisition of light fields feasible, though considerable design effort is still necessary in order to construct the necessary collection of optical elements for particular acquisition scenarios. This paper explores a pipeline for designing, fabricating and utilizing faceted mirror arrays which simplifies this task. The ...

Short term decision support for manufacturing systems is generally difficult because of the initial data needed by the calculations. Previous works suggest the use of a discrete event observer in order to retrieve these data from a virtual copy of the workshop, as up to date as possible at any time. This proposal offered many perspectives, but suffers from the difficulties to generate a decisio...

A safe and flexible co-operation between robot and operator may be a promising way to achieve better productivity at the manual workplace. Thus, robot assistants can be thought to be clever helpers in manufacturing environments for fetch and carry jobs, assembly, handling, machining, measuring etc. Key components and methods supporting these next generation robot systems are currently under int...