Additive manufacturing is heralded as a revolutionary process technology. While it has yet to cause a dramatic transformation of the manufacturing system, there are early signs of how the characteristics of this novel production process can improve resource efficiency and other sustainability aspects. In this paper, we draw on examples from a wide range of products and industries to understand ...

Japan is one of the most advanced countries in manufacturing technology, and lasers have played an important role in the advancement of manufacturing technology in a variety of industrial fields. The contribution of laser materials processing to Japanese industry is significant for both macroprocessing and microprocessing. The present paper describes the recent trend and topics of industrial ap...

ABSTRACT Six Sigma is a widely used moniker to represent a set of design and manufacturing techniques, the aggregate of which should effectively improve quality and lower cost. Six Sigma implies that six standard deviations of performance should be maintained between the performance mean and the closest specification limit. When multiple performance attributes must be satisfied, aggregation tec...

The role of non-destructive material characterization and NDT is changing at a rapid rate, continuing to evolve alongside the dramatic development of novel techniques based on the principles of high-resolution imaging. The modern use of advanced optical, thermal, ultrasonic, laser-ultrasound, acoustic emission, vibration, electro-magnetic, and X-ray techniques, etc., as well as refined measurem...

One of the most widespread techniques to evaluate various aspects of an existing manufacturing system is discrete-event simulation (DES). However, building a simulation model of a manufacturing system needs great resource expenditures. Automated data collection and model buildup can drastically reduce the time of the design phase as well as support model reusability. Since most of the manufactu...

To cope with fast changing customer requirements, industrial demands and to meet stringent specifications of customers Cellular Manufacturing Systems has become an effective tool in hands of manufacturers. Most of the published literature on cell formation earlier considers only the data available in the route sheets and ignored subproblems associated with cell formation. There is a need to dev...

Manufacturing systems are complex entities, comprised of people, processes, products, information systems and data, material processing, handling, and storage systems. Because of this complexity, systems must be modeled using a variety of views and modeling formalisms. In order to design and properly integrate system functions, the multiple views and models must often be considered simultaneous...