Optimisation of factories, a cornerstone production engineering for the past half century, relies on formulating challenges with limited degrees freedom. In this paper, technological advances are reviewed to propose “daydreaming” framework factories that use their cognitive capacity looking into future or “foresighting”. Assessing and learning from possible eventualities enable breakthroughs ma...

2,4,7,9-Tetramethyl-5-decyne-4,7-diol (TMDD) is a non-ionic surfactant which is preferentially used as defoamer in paints and printing ink and for the treatment of surfaces. Effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have been identified as the domination point sources for TMDD in rivers since the removal rate of the compound in the WWTPs is in general less than 70%. However, the dominati...

This paper studies a new generalization of the regular permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) referred to as the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem or DPFSP. Under this generalization, we assume that there are a total of identical factories or shops, each one with machines disposed in series. A set of n available jobs have to be distributed among the factories and then ...

Chinese processing trade has grown considerably as firms have adopted a wide array of organizational forms to have their products assembled in China for export. To understand the coexistence of processing via foreign investment versus multiple forms of outsourcing, we modify Grossman and Helpman’s (2004) of managerial incentives to account for the economic costs associated with various firms’ i...

Moveable factories can enable leapfrogging of fixed industrial factories, and so make immediate contributions to global goals of more resilient sustainable manufacturing. Moveable factories bring into use diverse technological advances that reduce the number, size, and weight of machines needed to carry out manufacturing operations at points of supply and/or demand. However, fixed industrial fa...

Exposure to biological agents and dusts occurs in homes and occupational environments and it is known to cause adverse health effects. There is limited information concerning the occupational exposure levels of airborne biohazard during wood processing, but this exposure is associated with a range of adverse health effects. Control of exposure to microbiological hazards and dust in woodworking ...