1 Introduction This chapter reviews efforts of selected standards consortia to develop Internet-based approaches for interoperable manufacturing enterprise information systems. The focus of the chapter is on the efforts to capture common meaning of data exchanged among interoperable information systems inside and outside a manufacturing enterprise. We start this chapter by giving a general over...

Planar Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) manufacturing can be considered in the pilot plant stage with efforts driving towards large volume manufacturing. The science of the solid oxide fuel cell is advancing rapidly to expand the knowledge base and use of material combinations and layer forming methods for the unit cell. Few of the many processing methods, > 15, reported in literature for layer for...

Using high-level, 3-D computer graphics simulation and other engineering analysis tools, this research investigates the ergonomic advantages of one manufacturing system design over another. The designs compared are lean manufacturing (manufacturing cells) and the functional (job shop) design. Simulation models based on an actual manufacturing cell and its workers are used to generate correspond...

Industrial manufacturing of injectable drug products presents very different and difficult challenges when compared to other industrial manufacturing applications. In order to enhance patient safety and ensure product quality the Pharmaceutical Industry has been implementing systems called Advanced Aseptic Processing (AAP) systems. Advanced Aseptic Processing systems utilize advanced forms of a...

Simulation technology has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for reducing costs, improving quality, and shortening the time-to-market for manufactured goods in the manufacturing industry. But, there are a number of technical and economic barriers that hinder the use of this technology in the manufacturing industry. The cost of developing, implementing, and using simulation technology is ...

Traditional concepts for manufacturing process optimization, e.g., Lean Production and Total Quality Management, represent management-driven and experience-based approaches. The increasing use of cyber-physical systems as well as the digitalization of manufacturing operations management by manufacturing execution systems (MES) lead to enormous amounts of structured and unstructured manufacturin...

To improve the overall efficiency, from a supply chain perspective, manufactures are focusing their activities around a limited number of coreprocesses. Consequently the internal processing degree is reduced. When the degree of internal processing is reduced, the organizational balance between manufacturing processes and cross-organizational integration processes shifts, and this is reflected i...

Most visual quality inspections in discrete manufacturing are composed of length, surface, angle or intensity measurements. Those are implemented as end-user configurable inspection tools that should not require an image processing expert to set up. Currently available software solutions providing such capability use a flowchart based programming environment, but do not fully address an inspect...

Manufacturing Flexibility is the ability of a manufacturing system to respond, at a reasonable cost and appropriate speed, to planned or unplanned changes in external or internal environments. It is accomplished by multidimensional attributes of the manufacturing system. In the global, rapidly changing modern market conditions manufacturing flexibility becomes a necessity in many industrial env...