Three issues have deeply influenced the Canadian automobile industry in the last decades. Proliferation of models and vehicle-types has reduced the average sales per vehicle with important consequences on the manufacturing side. Manufacturers have responded by adopting flexible production technology in their assembly plants. One of the most important features of the flexible technology is the a...

The technological process of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) application in the system of precise farming includes sequential interrelated operations: monitoring and sounding of crops (using light UAVs equipped with multispectral cameras), obtaining, processing and transmitting information for crop management, differentiated application of pesticides and fertilizers according to a specified trea...

South African heavy vehicles are currently designed according to suggested standards designed and enforced by the National Department of Transport (DoT); these standards are regulated in terms of mass, dimensions and vehicle configuration. However, the current prescriptive standards leave little room for innovation in terms of heavy vehicle design. Performance Based Standards (PBS), originated ...

A question of major importance in the auto industry concerns the modeling and improved design of vehicle tires. Tire performance affects the handling performance of the automobile. Many of the variables on which tire performance depends can be calculated from the load and deflection of the spindle in the suspension system for each wheel. The question of tire performance thus becomes a question ...

In recent years, networking issues have become more and more important in the design of vehicle control systems. In the beginning of the 1990s a vehicle control system was built up by ‘simple’ computer nodes exchanging ‘simple’ and relatively non-critical data. Today we have moved into distributed vehicle control systems with functions spanning several nodes from different vendors. These system...

Service quality and driver efficiency in the delivery industry may be enhanced by increasing the regularity with which a driver visits the same set of customers. However, effectively managing a workforce of drivers may increase travel distance, a traditional metric of the vehicle routing problem (VRP). This paper evaluates the effect that workforce management has on routing costs, providing ins...

Automations in the transport industry using embedded system prove to be a great investment. The paper describes a system which does the job of detecting, billing and accounting for vehicles as they pass through a tollgate using ZIGBEE as the identification technology. It reduces the common hustles in accounting for the movement of goods from point to point. A vehicle unique ID is programmed wit...

With global non-renewable resources and environmental issues becoming more apparent, the development of new energy vehicles have become the trend of auto industry. Hybrid vehicle becomes the key development of new energy vehicles with its long distance, low pollution, low fuel consumption characteristics and so on. The battery performances directly influence the quality of the whole vehicle per...

In recent years, networking issues have become more and more important in the design of vehicle control systems. In the beginning of the 1990s a vehicle control system was built up by ‘simple’ computer nodes exchanging ‘simple’ and relatively non-critical data. Today we have moved into distributed vehicle control systems with functions spanning several nodes from different vendors. These system...

Developing adaptable and flexible product architectures provides for meaningful levels of cosmetic, electronic, ergonomic, structural, and material customization. Today, automobiles are the result of intricate supply chains, integrated manufacturing techniques and just-in-time manufacture of component modules. While these changes have compensated for increased complexity and sophistication at c...