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Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; The increasing globalization is a trend which forces manufacturing industry of today to focus on more cost-effective manufacturing systems and collaboration within global supply chains and manufacturing networks. Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is evolving as a new manufacturing paradigm to match this trend, enabling the mutually advantageous sharing of resources, knowledge and information between distributed companies and manufacturing units. Providing a framework for collaboration within complex and critical tasks, such as manufacturing and design, it increases the companies’ ability to successfully compete on a global marketplace. One of the major, crucial objectives for CM is the coordinated planning, control and execution of discrete manufacturing operations in a collaborative and networked environment. This paper describes the overall concept of adaptive Function Block control of manufacturing equipment in Cloud environments, with the specific focus on robotic assembly operations, and presents Cloud Robotics as “Robot Control-as-a-Service” within C
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Automated packaging is becoming more and more interesting for various production sites even in Europe. However, in many companies the packaging process can only handle a limited amount of products. This leads to a very inflexible packaging and a bottle neck in the production. Most of the time for new products, the packaging system needs to be modified. One of the main components in an automated packaging process is the recognition and then the grasping of the objects that need to be packed. For different products mostly a different gripping system is required. In this paper, solutions from a research project are presented which enables the recognizing as a basis for flexible grasping of different products. These solutions includes a flexible pose recognition for different objects by a low cost system based on Kinect or or Asus Xtion camera
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; The industrial and increasing requirements of aesthetic products force the shape of product to have the complex 3D shapes. It is common to manufacture such products through three machining steps: rough machining, semi-finishing and finishing. Unlike 2.5D, rough machining step chip formation is different, depending on the tool movement in the machining process. Non-uniform chip load means unbalanced cutting force and the severe change of chip load may increase tool wear and reduce tool life. Although NC-data is generated considering machine dynamics, the irregular chip load may cause tool chatter. Especially, if the NC-data is generated without considering the dynamics of the machine tool, chatter can be created with adverse effects for the machine tool and workpiece. Thus this study proposes a methodology to analyze and generate chatter-free NC-data while maintaining the stability of the tool path. Each NC-block is divided into sections of unit-length NC-blocks and their stability is analyzed. The proposed method is validated through experimental results and is expected to improve machining productivity and qualit
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Multipurpose and programmable servo-actuated mechanisms may be envisaged as the key technology for increasing flexibility and re-configurability of modern automated machinery. Unfortunately, based on the current
state-of-the-art, these mechatronic devices are extremely flexible but generally energy intensive, thus compromising the overall system sustainability. Nonetheless, the system power consumption can be partially reduced if energy optimality is introduced as a design goal along with the global productivity. Naturally, as a first step towards the practical implementation of any energy-optimality criterion, the end user should be capable of predicting the system power flo
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; In this work Practical Evaluation Workover Framework (PEWF) can be defined as a procedure that provides a
practical workover maintenance system for workover and production engineers in the Oilfields. This procedure involves operators and technicians in the workover rigs acting as a team to monitor the workover procedures including Electrical Submersible Pump (ESP) processes (installation and nu-installation) and reduce the production losses in the oil wells by returning the oil well to production in the right time. The model's detail and procedures are simple to use and it supports workover rigs to implement the main structures of Total productive
maintenance (TPM) to improve the efficiency of the workover rig. PEWF is built on the collection and analysis of the Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) data gathered by the workover and production engineers on the workover rig. The OEE monitors the actual performance of workover relative to its performance capabilities under optimal workover conditions. The main purpose of an OEE results is to present essential data against where decisions may be made. These measurements assist the management to evaluate progress and help production and workover engineers identify the sources of problems on ESP processes and workover rigs activities. This method of calculating rig efficiency provides the practical measure of the workover performance which can aid in rig procedures negotiation and workover rig selectio
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Due to nationwide health hazard problems and the development and prevalence of information industry, Internet of Things (IOT)-based traceability system has gradually been applied to agricultural products to monitor the whole process from fields to final consumers, covering production, processing, and sales. This paper first analysis the factors that affect production-based processing enterprises and supermarkets as main patterns of direct link between farmers and supermarkets. A model for tracing the system or factors that affect agriculture product quality is then proposed. Finally, a prototype system is established and its application is discussed by adopting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, ASP.NET, and Web services technologies, with Visual Studio as the software development platform and SQL Server as the backstage database. The RFID is used here as an aid to gather product information. The importance of the system developed in this study lies in as follows: firstly, this system can realize the effective traceability of the whole process for agricultural products from the origin to final customers through the processing enterprises and supermarkets; secondly, adaptation of this system enables the transparency of the agricultural product information and, thus, the enterprises can be better managed; lastly, this system enhances the safety, consciousness of consumers, and supervision of government department for agricultural products qualit
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; The software design of current CNC systems is of limited suitability for real parallel execution on multicore systems. Even though CNC systems are rudimentarily designed in a modular way, a good load balancing and therefore an efficient use of multiple processor cores is not satisfactorily to be accomplished, as the modularization is not sophisticated enough. A parallelization of CNC functions and algorithms would remedy this deficit. This paper presents an analysis on which parts of a CNC system show the capability for parallelization. Furthermore an approach is presented on how the parallelization of a specific function, namely the look-ahead function, can be accomplishe
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; This paper proposes a new stochastic simulation optimization methodology that integrates meta-heuristic with sample average approximation for supply chain inventory optimization under supply uncertainty. The supply uncertainty specifically considered is quality imperfection/deviation modelled as a discrete or continuous distribution function. In order to approximate the expected total inventory-related cost, sufficient samples of quality deviations are generated and then the corresponding sample average function is optimized by a newly developed hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm. The proposed methodology and its individual components are presented. Numerical results of a single-distributor-multiple-retailer supply chain system with each adopting the (s, S) replenishment policy indicate that the proposed methodology is capable of obtaining high quality supply chain inventory policies with percentage optimality gap within 0.01%
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; There are usually two reasons that force a supply chain to adopt the consignment stocking policy: the high demand variance and the high risk of obsolescence. This research aims to study the influences of these two issues to a consignment stocking integrated supply chain. To better reflect the real situation in the engineering practice, the buyer’s warehouse limitation and a reducible lead time is also considered. A five-variable mixed-integer optimization model that aimed to minimize the annual joint total expected cost (JTEC) is developed under the general assumption that the production rate, the number of shipments and the shipping quantities are all fixed. To distinguish the Consignment Stocking policy from traditional ones, the holding cost is considered to consist of a storage component and a financial component. Due to the complexity of the objective function, traditional mathematical methods are cumbersome. As a result, closed-form solutions for the model are not provided. Instead, a novel doubly-hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm is employed to solve the problem. A numerical example is used to illustrate the solution procedure and the efficiency of the doubly-hybrid meta-heuristic algorith
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Engineering-Procurement-Construction project type is widely used in the industry of power generation development, and logistics management has been playing an important role in the execution of especially international power generation projects. Logistics in the area of power generation industry can be a very complicated system, typically involving many subcontractors related to logistical activities, requiring countless operations to be completed as well as deals with numerous interfaces between neighboring operations. With the objective of efficient and effective management and control of the whole logistics process, the paper proposes a “one-item-multiple-code” approach to realize the transparency and traceability of logistics managemen