... roughness and eventually to the fracture of the glass sample during the machining. In a material removal context—in opposition with polishing—feed rate should be carefully chosen since it is the most influential parameter on the surface finish. To maximize productivity while obtaining low-valleys surface...

...Lin Li; Qing Chang; Guoxian Xiao; Saumil Ambani Throughput bottlenecks define and constrain the productivity of a production line. The most cost-effective way to improve system throughput is to mitigate bottlenecks toward a balanced system. Most of the currently used bottleneck detection schemes...

... results in unit manufacturing process integration, sometimes known as a hybrid system. However, the design methods or approaches required to construct these integrated systems are vaguely described or not mentioned at all. The final product from any integrated system is affected not only by the unit...

...Zezhong C. Chen; Gang Liu Due to their complex geometries, sculptured surface parts should be machined with multiple cutters of optimal sizes for high quality and productivity. Current methods of determining cutter sizes, however, are conservative and inefficient; their repeating process includes...

...Xiaowei Zhu; S. Jack Hu; Yoram Koren; Samuel P. Marin Mixed-model assembly lines have been recognized as a major enabler to handle product variety. However, the assembly process becomes very complex when the number of product variants is high, which, in turn, may impact the system performance...

...Peng Chen; Gap-Yong Kim; Jun Ni High aspect ratio porous microfeatures are becoming more important in the modern industry. However, the fabrication of such features under a mass production environment remains a challenge when robustness, cost effectiveness, and high productivity requirements...

...Kehai Li; YuMing Zhang Gas metal arc welding (GMAW) is the most widely used process for metal joining because of its high productivity and good quality, but analysis shows that the fundamental characteristic restricts conventional GMAW from further increasing the welding productivity. A novel GMAW...

...Hegui Ye; Ming Liang Modular product design can facilitate the diversification of product variety at a low cost. Reconfigurable manufacturing, if planned properly, is able to deliver high productivity and quick responsiveness to market changes. Together, the two could provide an unprecedented...

...Zimin Yang; Qing Chang; Dragan Djurdjanovic; Jun Ni; Jay Lee Maintenance management has a direct influence on production performance. Existing works have not systematically taken the on-line production information into consideration in determining maintenance work-order priority, which is often...

...Zhiguo Li; Shiyu Zhou Variation source identification is a critical step in the quality and productivity improvement of manufacturing processes and draws significant attention recently. In this article we present a robust pattern-matching technique for variation source identification. In this paper...

...Theodor Freiheit; Moshe Shpitalni; S. Jack Hu The productivity of a manufacturing system is greatly influenced by the configuration of the manufacturing system. This paper examines the importance of configuration on productivity, and the improvements that can be obtained by bufferless parallel...

... productivity, improved part quality, reduced costs, and relaxed machine design constraints. The basis for this belief is two-fold. First, machining process automation can be applied to both large batch production environments and small batch jobs. Second, process automation can autonomously tune machine...