Logic control is an integral part of manufacturing systems. The creation and debugging of the logic control represents a significant amount of the effort needed to design a large manufacturing system. Today's rapidly shifting markets have greatly reduced the life of a product design and the manufacturing system to produce it. As a result reconfigurable manufacturing systems are being developed ...

Relationships are an integral part of the design of a database. Comparing and integrating relationships from heterogeneous databases requires that the relationships be mapped to each other or to a common classification. Identifying similarities and resolving differences in relationships across large data sources is a resource-intensive task that could benefit greatly from semi-automated approac...

Numerical modeling of electromagnetic nondestructive testing problems has become in the last few years common enough to be considered an integral part of the engineering design practice. In particular, eddy current modeling activity has been on the increase because of the benefits afforded by such models and their relative simplicity and availability. This is certainly true for two dimensional ...

Although considered proxies for people to interact with a system, mental models have produced limited practical implications for system design. This might be due to the lack of exploration of the elements of mental models resulting from the methodological challenge of measuring mental models. This study employed a new method, concept listing, to elicit people’s mental models of an information-r...

We present a novel interaction system, ‘‘Shape-It-Up’’, for creative expression of 3D shapes through the naturalistic integration of human hand gestures with a modeling scheme dubbed intelligent generalized cylinders (IGC). To achieve this naturalistic integration, we propose a novel paradigm of shape–gesture–context interplay (SGCI) wherein the interpretation of gestures in the spatial context...

The question raised by the panel is how much testing should be included in a VLSI Design course and what makes a “well-rounded” electrical and computer engineering graduate. The fact that we had to have a National Science Foundation workshop and now an ITC panel to discuss how to incorporate test in a design course shows that the disconnect between design and test happens not only in industry b...

This paper explores the adoption process of user-participative interaction design tools in manufacturing organisations in which they have not historically been used in the development of consumer product interfaces. Three case studies are presented describing the adoption of userparticipative design tools at different stages of implementation. The studies reveal an interesting ambivalence towar...

In this study, we have introduced a fuzzy decision-making approach to design a multi-objective optimal design problem of a multiproduct batch chemical plant. The design of such plants necessary involves how equipment may be utilized, which means that plant scheduling and production must form an integral part of the design problem. This work proposes an alternative treatment of the imprecision (...

The objective of this paper is to explore the state-of-the-art in generative process planning as it seems most suitable for the concept of Mass Customization (MC). Particular importance is attributed to special requirements of MC on the practice of process planning as it becomes an integral part of the value chain. Based on the literature review and the extended requirements of MC, the need for...

Quality of service (QoS) management is becoming an integral part of current web services. Contracts are playing a very important role in MAPE-based (monitor, analyse, plan and execute) web service QoS management. Therefore, we propose a general model, contract-MAPE (C-MAPE) model, and based on this model, review five major projects in this area. The analysis results show that these major resear...