Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper presents the scientific concerns and some results of the LiMITE - on the Assembly Line; Innovation, Work and Employment -project. Even considering the vast number of experimented industry production technologies, the classic assembly line has proved to be a structuring element within the frame of mass production, whereas known the difficulty to find practical alternative solutions. In this sense, the constraints brought up by the assembly line in order to develop innovative working practices remain relevant. For this reason, it is also important to look for the possibility to develop innovative working practices under the dominant model, i.e. the assembly line inherited from Ford The paper’s empirical section is based on two case studies pointed to two companies from the automotive components industry.

Within Leapjrog project, the general task is to design an effective and efficient manufacturing solution coping with the needs of the mass customization competitive scenario, overcoming the limitations which have so far prevented the automation of the garment assembly, through a comprehensive and general (‘holistic’) redesign of the cloth manufacturing process properly exploiting, flexible automation and robotic technologies. Virtual Reality simulation is a core part of the interactive validation of design choices. The garment assembly line simulator has various objectives: (a) Validation of the garment assembly line ‘holistic concept’; (b) Layout definition against realistic production data; (c) Prediction of realistic production metrics after line deployment. The simulator has been developed paying a special attention to easiness of maintenance: adding new resources or reports or changing the statistic of the production representative measures must require a limited effort; VR representation of what-if scenarios make easier comprehensive evaluation of alternative layout solutions.

The ongoing globalisation and international competition of manufacturing is requiring manufacturers to become more agile to efficiently use production resources. The ability to rapidly reconfigure production processes allows rapid ramp-up and robustness to adapt to unexpected events. In this paper, the reconfigurable machine tools and its characteristics is discussed in detail. Firstly, the basic modules of reconfigurable parallel machine tools are introduced. Then the criteria to form the reconfigurable machine are discussed. Some conceptual examples are illustrated and one case study is conducted.

This paper addresses the underlying principles of Evolvable Assembly Systems. This paradigm was recently proposed as an answer to the requirements faced by assembly companies in the current world of business and technological changes. The basis for this new approach lies in a multi-disciplinary study of the needs and requirements, and shifts the technological focus from complex, flexible, multi-purpose systems to simpler, process-oriented, dedicated swarms of machine modules.

This paper presents a new methodology for the deformation of soft objects by drawing an analogy between cellular neural network (CNN) and elastic deformation. An improved CNN model is developed to simulate the deformation of soft objects. A finite volume based method is presented to derive the discrete differential operators over irregular nets for obtaining the internal elastic forces. The proposed methodology not only models the deformation dynamics in continuum mechanics, but it also simplifies the complex deformation problem with simple setting CNN templates.

The dedicated photolithography machine constraint in semiconductor manufacturing is one of the new issues of photolithography machinery due to natural bias. In this paper, we propose the heuristic Load Balancing (LB) scheduling approach based on a Resource Schedule and Execution Matrix (RSEM) to tackle this constraint. The LB method is to schedule each wafer lot at the first photolithography stage to a suitable machine, according to the load balancing factors among machines. We describe the proposed LB scheduling method and present an example to demonstrate the proposed method and the result of the simulations to validate the approach.

In this paper, flow shop scheduling problems with total flowtime minimization is considered. IRZ (Iterative RZ, presented by Rajendran and Ziegler, EJOR, 1997) is found to be effective to improve solutions and LR (developed by Liu & Reeves, EJOR, 2001) is suitable for initial solution developing. By integrating FPE (forward pair wise exchange) and FPE-R)forward pair wise exchange- restart) with IRZ, two efficient composite heuristics, ECH1 and ECH2, are proposed Computational results show that the proposed three outperform three best existing ones in performance and ECH1 is best. IRZ is the fastest heuristic. ECH2 is a trade-off between IRZ and ECH1 both in effectiveness and efficiency.

In this paper, a novel Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) identification algorithm for time-varying systems with a colored noise is presented. Presented criterion function can show not only outside system output error but also inside parameters error in order to explain more difference between actual and estimative system, identification algorithm may consist of many different PSO algorithms that are named the combinatorial PSO. The estimating and tracking of parameters make use of characteristics of different PSO algorithms. The simulation and result show that the identification algorithm for time-varying systems with noise was indeed more efficient and robust in combinatorial PSO comparing with the original particle swarm optimization.

This paper presents the development of a remote monitoring and control system for a CIM plant. It discusses the main steps for the system specification. The purpose of the remote access system is to provide the user with facilities necessary to understand the system behavior, propose supervisory control strategies and test them.

With the deregulation of the electrical power industry, there is a strong need for power SCADA system to interoperate with other information systems. The interoperation between SCADA and all other systems not only needs the information sharing, but also the business - or transaction-based information integration. This paper presents a Web-based architecture for power SCADA system, which is a multi-tier distributed framework using J2EE technology. This architecture combines pervasive browser with flexible user-specified application client, supports Web-service integration and transaction control, and provides a unified security policy. With the advantages of J2EE platform, this new Web-based SCADA system seamlessly integrates traditional SCADA with the enterprise information system, and exhibits more flexibility, scalability, and security than precious Web-browsing-only SCADA system.