In spite of many recent advances in MEMS technologies for integrated planar devices, most products of the future will continue to require assembly from separate parts because of differing material property requirements, the need to have a three-dimensional extent, or because of many different end user functional needs. Because many products will be very small and complex, or larger products wil...

In micro-manufacture manual assembly often becomes unfeasible due to the small size of the products. As a result microassembly is becoming a sector of strategic importance in high labour cost areas due to the specific needs of automated fabrication and assembly processes. This in turn makes outsourcing a less attractive option. It is well recognised that the production of miniaturised products ...

In spite of the increasing use of COTS products for system development, there is little consideration on how to acquire requirements for COTS products, how to select COTS components and how to assemble them to comply to these requirements. The paper addresses the issue of the requirements engineering process for COTS components acquisition and assembly. It proposes an approach based on the noti...

Assembly line balancing problems consist in partitioning the work necessary to assemble a number of products among di erent stations of an assembly line. We present a hybrid approach for solving such problems, which combines constraint programming and integer programming.

Increasing customer demands for product variety in conjunction with the short lifecycle of products has caused manufacturing companies to introduce a wide range of products by accommodating flexibility. An assembly system is an essential part of the manufacturing system from both cost and time perspectives. Hence, the shift towards flexibility in manufacturing companies highlights the significa...