The papers in this special issue focus on artificial intelligence (AI) for efficiency and sustainability assembly/disassembly industrial processes. Assembly disassembly lines are the backbone of modern manufacturing. These transform raw materials into finished products or take apart used reuse recycling. designed to optimize process putting together products, ensuring that each part is right pl...

In this paper, we model multi-class multi-stage assembly systems with finite capacity as queueing networks. It is assumed that different classes (types) of products are produced by the production system and products’ orders for different classes are received according to independent Poisson processes. Each service station of the queueing network specifies a manufacturing or assembly operation, ...

An efficient manual micro assembly is a critical step in micro production. For a human operator, the manual assembly of miniature products presents a particular challenge. Amongst the challenges present in manual micro assembly are inadequately large human forces which increase the risk of damaging sensible products as well as the operator‟s limited capability of executing fine precision moveme...

In the era of synthetic biology, techniques for rapidly constructing a designer long DNA from short DNA fragments are desired. To realize this, we attempted to establish a method for one-step DNA assembly of unprecedentedly large numbers of fragments. The basic technology is the Ordered Gene Assembly in Bacillus subtilis (OGAB) method, which uses the plasmid transformation system of B. subtilis...

Modular polyketide synthases and nonribosomal peptide synthetases are giant multienzymes that catalyze the assembly of a wide variety of bioactive natural products including several important clinical drugs. In simple mechanical terms, these systems function as molecular assembly lines, where each domain in the multienzyme performs its task once during the assembly process. However, several pol...

The assembly process is one of the most time consuming and expensive manufacturing activities. The cost of assembly on an average is 10-30% of the manufacturing cost of a commercial product. The ratio between cost and performance of assembly has gradually increased with respect to the other phases of the manufacturing process and in recent years, this fact has caused a growing interest by indus...

Over the past decade, the integration of synthetic chemistry with flow processing has resulted in a powerful platform for molecular assembly that is making an impact throughout the chemical community. Herein, we demonstrate the extension of these tools to encompass complex natural product synthesis. We have developed a number of novel flow-through processes for reactions commonly encountered in...

This paper discusses the rationale of process platform-based production configuration in mass customization production. A multilevel system of nested colored object-oriented Petri nets (PNs) with changeable structures is developed to model the configuration of production processes. The obtained process for a new member of a product family involves both manufacturing and assembly processes for t...

This paper presents a framework for Design For Assembly of hybrid microsystems. Hybrid microsystems are microsystems, mainly semi-conductor based, which offer diverse functionality, and which are realised by integrating elements (die, parts) from different material and technology domains. From macro-domain mechanical products, it is known that the design of these products is of major importance...

This paper introduces a design for agile manufacturing workcells intended for light mechanical assembly of products made from similar components (i.e. parts families). We define agile manufacturing as the ability to accomplish rapid changeover from the assembly of one product to the assembly of another product. Rapid hardware changeover is made possible through the use of robots, flexible part ...