The application of Remote Laser Welding (RLW) has become an attractive assembly technology in various branches of industry, as it offers higher efficiency at lower costs compared to traditional Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) when high volumes of sheet metal assemblies are to be produced. However, the introduction of RLW technology raises multiple new issues in designing the configuration, the la...

A novel approach to the problem of text understanding is presented, which exploits a distributed processing concept, where knowledge from different sources comes into play in the course of comprehension. In the paper the rationale of advocating such an approach and the.advantages in following it are discussed. A prototype parser based on an original distributed problem-solving architecture is p...

Nowadays, the wire harness assembly process is still manually performed due to complexity and product variability (e.g., wires of different kind, size length). The Wire cobots project, in which this work was conceived, aims at improving current state-of-art by introducing it collaborative robotics. A shared workstation exploiting human abilities machine strengths developed automotive means insu...

BACKGROUND Prolonged sitting time has been identified as a health risk factor. Sit-stand workstations allow desk workers to alternate between sitting and standing throughout the working day, but not much is known about their acceptability and feasibility. Hence, the aim of this study was to qualitatively evaluate the acceptability, feasibility and perceptions of using sit-stand workstations in ...

This study investigated the influence of workstation and work posture ergonomics on the job satisfaction of librarians in the Federal and State University libraries in Southern Nigeria. The study adopted the survey research design. The total enumeration technique was used to include the 500 librarians from the 37 Federal and State University libraries in Southern Nigeria. Descriptive statistics...

This paper presents the design decisions encountered during the development of a specialised processor for the Monte-Carlo simulation of metallurgical sintering. Several possible architectures are presented. We show that such a specialised processor using commercially available gate array technology can solve the same problem more than 100 times faster than a modern high-end workstation. Even u...

Predicting the effectiveness of user interfaces at the design stage has been extensively explored for the traditional computer workstation and the expert user. Various analytical tools, such as CogTools apply the Keystroke Level Model (KLM) approach to evaluate software designs for efficiency prior to development. The mobile platform presents additional input paths and resource constraints not ...

This paper presents the design decisions encountered during the development of a specialised processor for the Monte-Carlo simulation of metallurgical sintering. Several possible architectures are presented. We show that such a specialised processor using commercially available gate array technology can solve the same problem more than 100 times faster than a modern high-end workstation. Even u...

Traditionally in a now each user works on his workstation independently of other users. So, it is possible that a user needs more resources than those ooered by his workstation, whereas the resources of other workstations may be under-used. This paper presents the design of two integrated mechanisms which eeciently use the physical memories and processors of a now to improve the application per...

A DBMS kernel architecture is proposed for improved DB support of engineering applications running on a cluster 01 worl<stations. Using such an approach, part of the DBMS code an application-specific layer is allocated close to the corresponding application on a workstation while the kernel code is executed on a central server. Empirical performance results from DB-based engineering application...