Production Systems

This paper investigates, on the basis of work by Jean Baudrillard and David Harvey, what we can define as neo-liberal global culture. Harvey's ideas on time-space compression and management of such within production systems are in the paper combined with Baudrillards thoughts on the symbolic culture and consumerism. The paper concludes that the neo-liberal global culture is a of constructing cultural demand and controlling class determined production.

Simulation games have been utilized as an educational tool in order to complement the traditional teaching methods. They have been widely applied in the teaching of different subjects such as business management, nursing, and medicine. This paper proposes a new simulation game which simulates a production system that consists of a set of machines, conveyors, and other components.

In this paper, the verification strategy of PROVER environment is presented. The PROVER system (PROduction system for hardware VERification) is implemented using CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System). PROVER is a rulebased framework for formal hardware verification. The environment supports verification at different levels of hardware specification. Verification strategy is illustrated in this paper using Carry select adder as a case study. Ref er en c e s (1) Elleithy, "Formal Hardware Verification: of VLSI Architectures: Current Status and Future directions" in T I-PC3.3

The performance concept originated from the concept of firm management. The performance management of the firm involves improving its value-cost relationship, which means that the firm will be able to build a product or service, in terms of achieving cost and profitability targets, and compare the results with strategic forecasts. In addition, performance management also requires the firm's ability to develop a dynamic and continuous progress. In such conditions, its performance evaluation is not an objective in itself, but a means used by the organization to achieve progress. The paper will address issues which relate to improving performance and all the instruments used for this purpose.

As can be expected, the computer time required for this tech nique using a full iteration is higher than that for the de flow technique which only uses a half iteration. However, since the main reason for this technique is to flag system voltage problems, these timings have to be compared with that of the exhaustive solutions that rigorously solve the volt-var equations. The results of applying this technique to a Southeastern U.S. utility system are presented. The timings and the capture ratios for this system establish the feasibility of this method.

This paper presents the results of case study research conducted at a major U S . automotive firm. Four waves of qualitative data were collected to identify the organizational and technological changes needed to implement concurrent engineering practices. The desire to cut product development time was the driving factor in a strategy designed to boost sales and market share. The company was successful in shortening concept-tomarket time by over one year on its first newly designed vehicle, primarily through the use of product-focused, cross-functional platform teams which permitted the early integration of manufacturing personnel into product and process development. While technology played an important role in this transformation, organizational, and human resource changes were the greatest enablers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consists of a cloud-based infrastructure to offer consumers raw computation resources such as storage and networking. These resources are billed using a pay-per-use cost model. However, this type of infrastructure is far from being a security haven as the seven main threats defined by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) indicate. Using logging systems can provide evidence to support accountability for an IaaS cloud, which helps us mitigating known threats. In this paper, we research to which extent such logging systems help mitigate risks associated with the threats identified by the CSA. A generic architecture 'template' for logging systems is proposed. This template encompasses all possible instantiations of logging solutions for IaaS cloud. We map existing logging systems to our generic template, and identify a logging solution to mitigate the risks associated with CSA threat number one (related to spam activities). We then argue that the template we suggest can be used to perform a systematic analysis of logging systems in terms of security before deploying them in production systems.

In facing the problem of building a complex yet fast and resource efficient Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Extended Resource Planning (XRP) system the first obstacle is the creation of a Bill of Materials (BoM) algorithm, which is used to calculate material needs according to the production plan. Taking into consideration different possibilities of BoM implementation, we compared linked lists, tree structure and matrix implementation in relation to algorithm complexity. As we came to the conclusion that none of them suits the needs of modern systems, we proposed a new BoM algorithm called multiple linked list implementation. It combines the advantages of other implementations with a new approach based on two complex data structures used to represent both the data and relationships between products, parts or components used in production.

The video editing is a work to produce the final videos with certain duration by finding and selecting appropriate cuts from the material videos and connecting them. In order to produce the excellent videos, this process is generally conducted according to the special rules called "video grammar". The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent support system for video editing so that metadata are extracted automatically and then the video grammars are applied to the extracted metadata. In this paper, we describe the metadata extraction such as camera work, camera tempo, camera direction, face and shot size.

The present study was carried out to establish knowledge of consequence for setting up guidelines of importance for production of competitive organic pork of high quality. Performance and meat quality characteristics were compared between three organic pig production systems based on indoor housing with access to an outdoor area and a Danish conventional indoor system including 100% concentrate during the finishing feeding stage.

Production monitoring is an important task for proper production planning. For this task the information that a system of this nature can possibly gather assumes significant importance. Among all the information available during production, the detection of faults assumes a crucial role since it directly affects the quality and productivity. This paper presents a system which was developed with the purpose of performing the analysis in real time of the knitting process, supplying the parameters of major concern for production and furthermore, allowing the detection, identification and location of faults.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the production systems of the various integrated iron and steel companies in East Asia based on a generation model of production systems. Japanese companies are the leaders in the field of evolution of steel production systems. However, POSCO has established a generation 2.5 system; it is rapidly catching up to its Japanese rivals. Baosteel also has a generation 2.5 system with imported
technology; it has also begun to develop its own R&D activity so that it will then have the capability to evolve. All of the Chinese integrated companies (other than Bao), and the Taiwanese company CSC are trying to improve their production systems from the second generation. CSC has adopted a unique approach to
upgrading by alliances with non-automobile industries. The major finding of this research is that investment for construction and upgrading of production systems is a driving force that improves the competitiveness of integrated companies in East Asia. Additionally, we can draw some suggestions about the challenges that integrated companies in East Asia face from the perspective of international competition and system evolution.

Failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is a widely used technique to improve products and processes safety and reliability in different contexts, such as automotive, aviation, computer science, etc. FMECA approach is based on a qualitative/quantitative analysis of a system (product or process) and its components in order to identify the most critical elements for system operability and safety through the evaluation of failure mode causes and effects.

This paper reports on experiences in transitioning a capstone course from a single-quarter to three-quarters. A singlequarter project course in software design and development had been offered by our department for over twenty years. More recently, upon formation of a new undergraduate degree in Informatics, this course was transformed into a three-quarter capstone course taken by students in their final year. Correspondingly, some aspects of the course projects, such as the business scope and software complexity, grew in proportion to the increase in the project duration. At the same time, a number of "costs" were reduced, including the time and effort required to set up the development infrastructure and development environments, and learn new tools and languages. Most importantly, several other factors experienced substantial growth. The longer project duration allowed significant increase in the effort and attention paid to usability engineering and user-centered design, leading to systems that were deployable and more usable for the target users. It also enabled better software testing, deployment and release management. As a result, the final outcome was much closer to production quality than the prototypes and proof-ofconcept systems typical of earlier single-quarter projects.

why isn't there more progress toward building systems ?om existingparts? One anmer is that the asmmptions of the parts about their intended environment are implicit and either don't match the actual environment or conflict with those of other parts. The authors explore these problems in the context of their own experience 1 with a compositional approach.

This paper presents an assessment of the electricity generated by photovoltaic (PV) grid-connected systems in Kuwait. Three years of meteorological data are provided for two main sites in Kuwait, namely, Al-Wafra and Mutla. These data and a PV grid-connected system mathematical model are used to assist a 100 kWp grid-connected PV system proposed for both sites. The proposed systems show high energy productivity whereas the annual capacity factors for Mutla and Al-Wafra are 22.25% and 21.6%, respectively. Meanwhile ...

This paper presents the extension to an ontology-based data model supporting the design and performance evaluation of production systems. This extension aims to link the modeling of the spatial representation of physical objects with the characterization of their states and behavior. Furthermore, the formalization of the performance history of a production system and its components is addressed to capture both the spatial and state evolution of the objects. Such history can be provided by simulation runs or gathered from a monitoring system. A test case is described and then used to show how different software tools can be integrated to support the integrated design and evaluation of a production system.

The study objective was to characterize and classify buffalo dairy production systems in Egypt. Ten governorates having high buffalo population density were selected as the study area. The data were collected from 1811 dairy buffalo farms using survey. Buffalo holders were face to face interviewed by constructed questionnaire. The survey was applied in two years (2010 and 2011). Two-Step Cluster procedure (CA) was used and analysis was repeated several times until the cluster quality came good (average silhouette ≥0.5). The algorithm selected the number of clusters, after calculating the Akaike's information criterion (AIC). Statistics of CA showed that the numbers of farm in each cluster were 43 (2.4%) in cluster1 (CL1), 1364 (75.3%) in cluster2 (CL2) and 404 (22.3%) in cluster3 (CL3). CL1 farms had a good availability of facilities. The management practices were the higher in comparison with the farms in the other clusters. Management and feeding systems practices in CL1 ranged from medium to high. CL2 was the largest, with 1364 farms located in all the ten governorates. The availability of facilities and equipment were low or lacking. The management practices were the lowest in comparison with farms in other clusters. CL3 facilities availability were low to medium. The management practices were medium when compared with the farms in the other clusters. The results of the current study demonstrate the existence of a large variability among buffalo dairy production systems in Egypt. These systems variability should be taken into consideration for sustainable system development.

This paper examines the transfer of designs between projects within firm in the context of madeto-order producing companies. This practice is also known as knowledge reuse. Past studies has provided a detailed account of the strategies and processes involved in the reuse of technologies. Nonetheless, a large portion of this research was based on evidence collected in mass-producing companies. This paper attempts to develop a complementary framework to identify the strategies involved in reusing technologies in the made-to-order context. Data were drawn from three aerospace companies based in Israel. Two strategies emerged from the empirical evidence: exploit product success and design for reuse.

In this paper we describe O-DEVICE, a memory-based knowledge base system for reasoning and querying OWL ontologies by implementing RDF/OWL entailments in the form of production rules in order to apply the formal semantics of the language. Our approach is based on a transformation procedure of OWL ontologies into an Object-Oriented schema and the application of inference production rules over the generated objects in order to implement the various semantics of OWL. In order to enhance the performance of the system, we introduce a dynamic approach of generating production rules for ABOX reasoning and an incremental approach of loading ontologies. O-DEVICE is built over the CLIPS production rule system, using the object-oriented language COOL to model and handle ontology concepts and RDF resources. One of the contributions of our work is that we enable a well-known and efficient production rule system to handle OWL ontologies. We argue that although native OWL rule reasoners may process ontology information faster, they lack some of the key features that rule systems offer, such as the efficient manipulation of the information through complex rule programs. We present a comparison of our system with other OWL reasoners, showing that O-DEVICE can constitute a practical rule environment for ontology manipulation.

Failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is a widely used technique to improve products and processes safety and reliability in different contexts, such as automotive, aviation, computer science, etc. FMECA approach is based on a qualitative/quantitative analysis of a system (product or process) and its components in order to identify the most critical elements for system operability and safety through the evaluation of failure mode causes and effects.

The production planning and scheduling system used in refinery CIMS is discussed, where the production process, basic production characteristics, refinery production and administration, its activity types are introduced. An integrated refinery production plan and schedule system is put forward; its problem solving process is discussed in detail. A kind of integration framework used in the refinery CIMS and its computing environment are put forward and analysed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn out

The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domestic Product and number of jobs, emphasizes the need of proper ICT tools to support their competitiveness. Major ICT players already offer one-does-all Product Lifecycle Management suites, supporting several phases of the product-process-plant definition and management. However, these do also show consistent shortcomings in terms of SME accessibility, degree of personalization and they often lack of an acceptable level of interoperability. These problems are being addressed by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), within an EU funded project. The approach is based on four pillars: 1) Semantic Shared Data Model, 2) Virtual Factory Manager (VFM), 3) Decoupled Software Tools that lay on the shared data model and can interact through the VFM, 4) Integration of Knowledge. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager, proposing an evolution of the former VFF second Pillar , that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the framework and its stored knowledge for the decoupled software tools needing to access its repository.

Colloidal quantum dot light-emitting devices (QD-LEDs) have generated considerable interest for applications such as thin film displays with improved color saturation and white lighting with a high color rendering index (CRI). We review the key advantages of using quantum dots (QDs) in display and lighting applications, including their color purity, solution processability, and stability. After highlighting the main developments in QD-LED technology in the past 15 years, we describe the three mechanisms for exciting QDs Á optical excitation, Fö rster energy transfer, and direct charge injection Á that have been leveraged to create QD-LEDs. We outline the challenges facing QD-LED development, such as QD charging and QD luminescence quenching in QD thin films. We describe how optical downconversion schemes have enabled researchers to overcome these challenges and develop commercial lighting products that incorporate QDs to achieve desired color temperature and a high CRI while maintaining efficiencies comparable to inorganic white LEDs (65 lumens per Watt). We conclude by discussing some current directions in QD research that focus on achieving higher efficiency and air-stable QD-LEDs using electrical excitation of the luminescent QDs.