Scheduling problems play a big role in manufacturing and planning the production for increasing the production efficiency and assigning the resources to operations. Furthermore, in many manufacturing systems there is a physical space between stages that called intermediate buffers. In this study, a model is proposed for minimizing the makespan of a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with inter...

With the ongoing global pressure of cost cutting and quality focus, many companies have been implementing “lean manufacturing” concepts to survive in this competitive marketplace. “Lean” concepts have found their place in manufacturing and service industries; an important key to eliminating waste and delivering value to the customers. Thus, it is imperative that engineering management graduates...

quality inspection is an indispensable part of modern industrial manufacturing. steel as a major industry requires constant surveillance and supervision through its various stages of production. continuous casting is a critical step in the steel manufacturing process in which molten steel is solidified into a semi-finished product called slab. once the slab is released from the casting unit, th...

Most business negotiations in supply chain and information exchange in manufacturing processes are heavily human-involved using proprietary data formats. The processes of negotiation and information exchange are usually time consuming and unreliable even in routine tasks. Software agents have been increasingly explored to improve the information flow and the decision-making process within netwo...

With a legacy of legal cartels, protectionism and government intervention in private economic activity, Japan endorses a different system of competitive capitalism from that which prevails in the United States. This research examines the effect of Japan's competition policies on the development of Japan's postwar steel industry. In this paper, I describe my findings on the Japanese system of in...

The Swedish physicist, Waloddi Weibull, is renowned for formulating a family of probability distributions for modelling the variability of nonnegative, quantitative, random phenomena (see reference 3). The distribution was originally designed to model the breaking strength of steel (Weibull was scientific advisor to Bofors, the Swedish steel company) but, since then, Weibull analysis has evolve...

A start-up company in Florida, called World Response Group (WRG), developed an unusual woven mat for the horticulture industry that was made from all-natural fibers. Horticulture growers in the U.S. produce hundreds of millions of potted plants each year. The product, called SmartGrow, dramatically reduced weed growth in potted plants and simultaneously provided important nutrients – all with n...

Manufacturing evaluation is performed with heuristics that are developed internally by the manufacturing experts in the company. Many of the existing manufacturing evaluation systems rely on highly specialized knowledge, extensive databases, and require a significant amount of time and cost that make these tools in general unavailable early in design and to small manufacturers who do not have t...