| Surface Mount Technology (SMT) is a robust methodology that has been widely used in the past decade to produce circuit boards. Analyses of the SMT assembly line have shown that the automated placement machine is often the bottleneck, regardless of the arrangement of these machines (parallel or sequential) in the assembly line. Improving and automating the placement machine is a key issue for ...

A new algorithm for a component placement machine is proposed in this study. The new algorithm is compared with former approaches on synthetically generated benchmark instances. It outperforms the former approaches by 3.28% on printed circuit board with 100 components to be placed. We prove that this new approach works better in a typical PCB mounted in the industry, so can be applicable to the...

This paper mainly analyses the issues of the temperature distributions of the headstock assembly of a CNC lathe incorporating contact behavior. The thermal deformation is due to the heat generation in the bearings, chucking cylinder and motor. Experiments were carried out on a slant bed 2 axis CNC lathe for a period of 14 hours under a specified load cycle. Since heat generated in the machine t...

Motion control systems have grown in sophistication and precision. However the precision of an entire machine process, for example an assembly operation, involves factors beyond the movement of the controlled mechanism. The initial location of parts prior to handling is subject to a tolerance often much greater than the placement tolerance. The correct position of a part is relative to the fina...

Ramp-up of precision assembly lines is a cost-intensive and experiencedriven task. Most of the time the knowledge how to effectively and efficiently setup an assembly line is intrinsic and is therefore neither shared nor reused by production experts. Almost no machine data is recorded until the correct functionality of the line is achieved and human problem solving tasks are not or poorly docum...

Despite extensive theoretical work on process-calculi, virtual machine specifications and implementations of actual computational models are still scarce. This paper presents a virtual machine for a strongly typed, polymorphic, concurrent, object-oriented programming language based on the TyCO process calculus. The system runs byte-code files, assembled from an intermediate assembly language re...

This paper proposed a parallel automated assembly line system to produce multiple products having multiple autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs). Several assembly lines are configured to produce multiple products in which the technologies of machines are shared among the assembly lines when required. The transportation between the stations in an assembly line (intra assembly line) and among station...

This paper introduces a new two-stage assembly scheduling problem. There are m machines at the first stage each of which produces a component of a job. When all m components are available, a single assembly machine at the second stage completes the job. The objective is to schedule jobs on the machines so that the makespan is minimized. It is shown that the search for an optimal solution may be...

The bacterial type III secretion system is a specialized machine that injects effectors into eukaryotic cells to manipulate the host cell physiology. In this issue of Cell, Hu et al. use cryo-electron tomography to reveal an unprecedented level of details regarding the architecture of this machine and the conformational changes that occur during its assembly.

This paper addresses the common cycle multi-product lot-scheduling problem in flexible flow lines (FFL) where the product demands are deterministic and constant over a finite planning horizon. Objective is minimizing the sum of setup costs, work-in-process and final products inventory holding costs per time unite while satisfying the demands without backlogging. This problem consists of a combi...