Documentation for a manufacturing system can range from a few hundred pages for a medium sized industrial machine-tool to many thousands of individual manuals together with supporting drawings for a complete manufacturing plant. With this volume of information, and the change to multi-skilling of personnel within many industrial plants, a number of problems with conventional information retriev...

Within the past decades, developments in manufacturing have been turbulent and radical. For the manufacturing and management sciences, revolutionary changes took place. Based on Kuhn’s findings on the nature of scientific revolutions, the paper consolidates projections for future developments in manufacturing by exploiting interactions of the most important drivers of these developments. Major ...

Moveable factories can enable leapfrogging of fixed industrial factories, and so make immediate contributions to global goals of more resilient sustainable manufacturing. Moveable factories bring into use diverse technological advances that reduce the number, size, and weight of machines needed to carry out manufacturing operations at points of supply and/or demand. However, fixed industrial fa...

On complex and flexible industrial collaboration environments, manufacturing traceability has to move from a traditional internal enterprise activity-based view to a collaborative and distributed one. The objective is to implement global traceability: traceability of the whole manufacturing process when performed by several partner companies (extended enterprise). The paper proposes a model to ...

Complete List of Authors: Huang, Gang; Huazhong University of Science & Technology, State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment & Technology Li, Jinhang; Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering Yuan, Xiaodong; Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering Gao, Liang; Huazhong University of Science & Techno...

The manufacturing company under consideration recorded the high accident rates for last few years. These accidents cause the organization the heavy man-day loss, the production loss and heavy costs of insurance. The objective of health and safety department at the manufacturing company was to set and improve accidents prevention system. The paper presents how does the six-sigma technique will h...

Industrial quality is presented as a direct result of manufacturing practices (e.g. tolerance allocation, process selection, inspection procedures). A quality indicator is developed that allows for the computation of a function representing the cost of an industrial product versus its quality level. This cost function is then incorporated in an economic model that estimates the consumer's deman...

Adopting “greener” manufacturing technologies is one means of reducing facility environmental impacts. To justify such capital investment, more informative environmental impact assessments are needed to determine their effects on the local environment. Since conventional life cycle assessment methods and manufacturing process models ignore consideration of space, time, and local environmental u...