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 ...

There has been a large and rapid evolution in terns of the paradigms and technologies to support the development of distributed manufacturing systems and real-time applications. This paper starts with a survey of the main proposals in the area based on the experience gained by the authors in various fields pertaining to manufacturing device modelling, control and supervision, industrial messagi...

Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is increasingly becoming a viable manufacturing process due to dramatic advantages that are achievable in the area of design complexity. Through the exploration of the design freedom, this paper introduces the concept of manufacturing textiles for potential smart and high performance textile applications. This paper discusses the current limitations associated with the ...

Holonic Manufacturing Systems have emerged over the last seven years as strategy for manufacturing control system design. A new approach called Holonic ComponentBased Architecture (HCBA) to establish a manufacturing control system as to cope with rapid changes in manufacturing environment is presented in this paper. Intelligent building blocks in terms of resource and product are proposed to dy...

Survival and success in present turbulent times increasingly depends on competitiveness. Competitiveness comes through an integrated effort across different functions and deployment of advanced manufacturing technologies. Advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) plays a major role in quality and flexibility improvements in manufacturing organizations. The automated “factory of the future” is see...

The transition to the New Economy accelerated in the last half of the 1990s. Using new economy index measures, one can see that rapid growth in service sector activity from 1990 to 2000, at 45 percent, overshadowed the performance of the nation’s manufacturing sector, at 22 percent (Atkinson and Court). We now live in an economy where 80 percent of all workers do not produce things. Even within...

This paper presents techniques of integrating haptic device into computer-aided design and manufacturing. The methodology is proposed as three steps: 1) develop the virtual sculpting system for aiding product design; 2) convert the product design into acceptable form for downstream manufacturing or rapid prototyping; 3) develop multi-axis polyhedral machining planning system with haptic input. ...

Purpose – Virtual voxels (3D pixels) have traditionally been used as a graphical data structure for representing 3D geometry. The purpose of this paper is to study the use of pre-existing physical voxels as a material building-block for layered manufacturing and present the theoretical underpinnings for a fundamentally new massively parallel additive fabrication process in which 3D matter is di...

Rapid prototyping (RP) process is inherently performed by layered manufacturing. The surface finish of the RP part is inevitably excessively rough. In this study, aluminum filled epoxy resin is used as a filler to improve surface quality of wax injection tool fabricated by fused deposition modeling. The average surface roughness of wax patterns can be drastically reduced from 1710 μm to 276 μm....

A parametric feature based jewelry modeler for designing and manufacturing of the Fret-worked bangles. These bangles are made from gold and adorned with fretwork designs. Fretwork is a decorative design that is either carved in low relief on a solid background, or cut out to adorn a jewelry item. Fretwork designs are viewed as features that are to be recurrently removed from the stock-solid ban...