a large volume of tailings has been produced in anjir-tangeh coal washing plant for 22 years of human activity. the coal washing activities have reduced plant diversity near the plant. the environmental impact of coal washing plant on the vegetation around the factory was studied in two seasons. the concentrations of pb, cd and cr, measured in different native plant species, were in normal rang...

The design of a manufacturing systems is a complex and critical activity entailing decisions with an impact on a long time horizon and a major commitment of financial resources. Indeed, the modelling, simulation and evaluation of manufacturing systems are relevant activities both in the design and the operational phases of a factory. This paper grounds on the results of the Virtual Factory Fram...

A new frontier of manufacturing research, biomedical manufacturing, is presented. Advanced manufacturing technologies, such as manufacturing processes, systems, and quality control, can be readily applied to improve the safety, quality, cost, efficiency, and speed of healthcare service and biomedical research. The analogy of the hospital as a factory is explored to broadly and inclusively defin...

For manufacturing companies growing customer expectations, shortening product life cycles and increasing product variant numbers mean great challenges. Overcoming these is a major task for production planning, which is responsible for coordinating all business processes directly related to manufacturing. This paper presents important activities of production planning giving an integrative overv...

In this paper, research towards interactive learning for robot Manufacturing Assistants is presented. The aim of this research is to develop a robot which can easily be instructed how to either perform tasks autonomously or in co-operation with humans. We describe the prototype of our Manufacturing Assistant and the methods developed for teaching new tasks and environments. The functionality ha...

Material handling systems consist of discrete or continuous resources to move entities from one location to another. They are more common in manufacturing systems compared to service systems. Material movement occurs everywhere in a factory or warehouse—before, during, and after processing. Apple (1977) notes that material handling can account for up to 80 percent of production activity. Althou...

This chapter summarizes our latest results concerning the development and the industrial application of the emerging “collaborative industrial automation” technology and its powerful meaning for facilitating the integration of a dynamic reconfigurable shop floor into a virtual factory. It argues, in this respect, that having a conglomerate of distributed, autonomous, intelligent, fault-tolerant...

Flow time of semiconductor manufacturing factory is highly related to the shop floor status; however, the processes are highly complicated and involve more than hundred of production steps. Therefore, a simulation model with the production process of a real wafer fab located in Hsin-Chu Sciencebased Park of Taiwan is built. In this research, a hybrid approach by combining Self-Organizing Map (S...

– Increasingly, automation and computer-based control play key roles in the operation of manufacturing systems. These two factors are necessary to support trends towards greater product customization and increased emphasis on reduction of lead times. At the same time, though, automation and computer-based control can be enormously expensive to design and implement in a factory. These high costs...