Safe innovation approach: Towards an agile system for dealing with innovations

Nanotechnologies are characterized by a growing legacy of already marketed and novel manufactured nanomaterials (MNMs) and nano-enabled products with a lack of a coherent risk governance system to address their safety effectively. In response to this situation, a proactive system is needed to minimize the gap between the pace of innovation and...

Parametric Critical Path Analysis for Event Networks with Minimal and Maximal Time Lags

High-end manufacturing systems are cyber-physical systems where productivity depends on the close cooperation of mechanical (physical) and scheduling (cyber) aspects. Mechanical and control constraints impose minimal and maximal time differences between events in the product flow. Sequence-dependent constraints are used by a scheduler to...

Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing systems using stochastic criticality analysis

System design is a difficult process with many design-choices for which the impact may be difficult to foresee. Manufacturing system design is no exception to this. Increased use of flexible manufacturing systems which are able to perform different operations/use-cases further raises the design complexity. One important criterion to consider is...

Recipe-Based Engineering and Operator Support for Flexible Configuration of High-Mix Assembly

Nowadays, manufacturers must be increasingly flexible to quickly produce a high mix of on-demand, customer-specific, low volume product types. This requires flexible assembly lines with operators that are well-supported in their constantly changing assembly task, while producing high-quality, first-time-right, zero-defect products. Information...

Online scheduling of 2-re-entrant flexible manufacturing systems

Online scheduling of operations is essential to optimize productivity of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) where manufacturing requests arrive on the fly. An FMS processes products according to a particular flow through processing stations. This work focusses on online scheduling of re-entrant FMSs with flows using processing stations where...

Online heuristic for the Multi-Objective Generalized traveling salesman problem

Today’s manufacturing systems are typically complex cyber-physical systems where the physical and control aspects interact with the scheduling decisions. Optimizing such facilities requires ordering jobs and configuring the manufacturing system for each job. This optimization problem can be described as a Multi-Objective Generalized TSP where...

Developing the organization's productivity strategy in various sectors of industry

Purpose: The paper aims to present an approach to improve the organisation's productivity which is applicable in every industrial sector. The nucleus of the approach is to develop an optimal productivity strategy in an organization by the application of a uniform static model of productivity (Q4-model), covering quantity and quality aspects and...

Inkjet technology for large-area OLED and OPV applications

The roll-to-roll manufacturing process is believed to significantly reduce the cost-price of flexible electronics. Inkjet printing of organic-based inks is a major research topic for flexible electronic applications because of its advantage of non- contact deposition and the ease for patterning for various industrial processes. We herein present...

Manufacturing and testing flexible microfluidic devices with optical and electrical detection mechanisms

Flexible microfluidic devices made of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) were manufactured by soft lithography, and tested in detection of ionic species using optical absorption spectroscopy and electrical measurements. PDMS was chosen due to its flexibility and ease of surface modification by exposure to plasma and UV treatment, its transparency in...