Since its presentation at the inaugural 1989 IAAI Conference (O’Brien et al. 1989), Ford’s Direct Labor Management System (DLMS) has evolved from a prototype being tested at a single assembly plant to a fully-deployed application that is being utilized at Ford’s assembly plants throughout the world. DLMS is Ford’s automated solution to managing the automobile manufacturing process system at our...

The Direct Linearization Method (DLM) for tolerance analysis of 3-D mechanical assemblies is presented. Vector assembly models are used, based on 3-D vector loops which represent the dimensional chains that produce tolerance stackup in an assembly. Tolerance analysis procedures are formulated for both open and closed loop assembly models. The method generalizes assembly variation models to incl...

Reconfigurable control systems are a key enabling technology for autonomous assembly, allowing for a single control system to maintain performance despite large mass property variations that occur from docking and undocking during assembly. There is a wide range of reconfigurable control systems that can be implemented, based on the amount of a priori information known to the designer. The rang...

Molecular farming has been considered as a secure and economical approach for production of biopharmaceuticals. Human TNF Related Apoptosis Inducing Ligand (TRAIL) as a promising biopharmaceutical candidate has been produced in different expression hosts. However, little attention has been paid to molecular farming of the TRAIL in spite of numerous advantages of plant expression systems. Theref...

Tolerance analysis of mechanical assemblies is an important tool in reliable design of products at low cost and good quality. Using this tool, it is possible in manufacturing stage to observe the effect of parameters on assembly requirements. The direct linearization method is a useful method which runs based on vector loop analysis. In this research, the DLM method is used to analyze the toler...

This paper describes a prototype software system that implements a form of featurebased design for assembly. It is not an automated design system but instead a decision and design aid for designers interested in Concurrent Design. Feature-based design captures design intent (assembly topology, product function, manufacturing, or field use) while creating part and product geometry. Design for as...

In the context of industrial engineering, the predetermined time systems (PTS) play an important role in workplaces because inefficiencies are found in assembly processes that require manual manipulations. In this study, an approach is proposed with the aim to analyze time and motions in a manual process using a capture motion system embedded to a virtual environment. Capture motion system trac...

This paper considers job shop scheduling problem followed by an assembly stage and Lot Streaming (LS). It is supposed here that a number of products have been ordered to be produced. Each product is assembled with a set of several parts. The production system includes two stages. The first stage is a job shop to produce parts. Each machine can process only one part at the same time. The second ...