Sharif Digital Repository

We propose an approach for finding an optimal path in a flexible jobshop manufacturing system considering two criteria of time and cost. With rise in demands, advancement in technology, and increase in production capacity, the need for more shops persists. Therefore, a flexible jobshop system has more than one shop with the same duty. The difference among shops with the same duty is in their machines with various specifications. A network is configured in which the nodes are considered to be the shops with arcs representing the paths among the shops. An Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) functions as a material handling device through the manufacturing network. To account for uncertainty, we... 

Abstract In a recent work, Alizadeh et al. (2013) studied a capacitated multi-facility location-allocation problem in which customers had stochastic demands based on the Bernoulli distribution function. Authors considered capacitated sub-sources of facilities to satisfy customer demands. In this discrete stochastic problem, the goal was to find optimal locations of facilities among candidate locations and optimal allocations of existing customers to operating facilities so that the total sum of fixed costs of operating facilities, allocation costs of customers and expected values of servicing and outsourcing costs was minimized. The model was formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear... 

Although managing and controlling the inventories of perishable products is progressively becoming more important, they are often neglected in lot-sizing research and modeling. This paper studies a new multi-product multi-period dynamic lot sizing problem, where the inventories of products are assumed to be expired at a pre-specified date. For this purpose we assume a retailer that purchases products in large quantities (lot size) from manufacturers, and then sells smaller quantities (or single units) to the consumer. So, the order quantities can be merely an integer multiplier of that product batch size. The retailer also owns a capacitated warehouse. In order to make decisions on "how much... 

Leakage power has already become the major contributor to the total on-chip power consumption, rendering its estimation a necessary step in the IC design flow. The problem is further exacerbated with the increasing uncertainty in the manufacturing process known as process variability. We develop a method to estimate the variation of leakage power in the presence of both intra-die and inter-die process variability. Various complicating issues of leakage prediction such as spatial correlation of process parameters, the effect of different input states of gates on the leakage, and DIBL and stack effects are taken into account while we model the simultaneous variability of the two most critical... 

In today's competitive supply chains, providing products which can stimulate the customer's demand and enhance the revenues of companies is an important objective. Therefore, three stimulating factors, including the carbon emission reduction, return policy and quality improvement efforts are taken into consideration in a supply chain (SC). In line with reducing carbon emission, two possibilities in the forward flow, including the technologies investment and the trade and cap are employed. In the reverse flow, hybrid remanufacturing of the imperfect quality products under technology license is investigated. The impacts of collecting-remanufacturing processes on carbon reduction, quality... 

Today's manufacturing enterprises struggle to adopt cost-effective manufacturing systems. Overview of the recent manufacturing enterprises shows that successful global manufacturing enterprises have distributed their manufacturing capabilities over the globe. The successes of global manufacturing enterprises depend upon the entire worldwide integration of their product development processes and manufacturing operations that are distributed over the globe. Distributed manufacturing agents' collaboration and manufacturing data integrity play a major role in global manufacturing enterprises' success. There are number of works, conducted to enable the distributed manufacturing agents to... 

This paper is seeking to design a dynamic cellular manufacturing system (DCMS). Area of multi-objective optimization is attractive not only for offering new opportunities for defining problem, but it helps us to extend and solve the anonymous problem. So a new multi-objective mixed integer model is presented for DCMS. The proposed model considers some real-world critical conditions in lean production which are neglected in similar studies in the literature. This model solves the part and machine grouping simultaneously with labor assignment to minimize the cost of various terms like reassignment cost of human resource, over time cost of equipments and labors, and maximize utilization rate of... 

The method of wave function expansion is adopted to study the three dimensional scattering of a time-harmonic plane progressive sound field obliquely incident upon a multi-layered hollow cylinder with interlaminar bonding imperfection. For the generality of solution, each layer is assumed to be cylindrically orthotropic. An approximate laminate model in the context of the modal state equations with variable coefficients along with the classical T-matrix solution technique is set up for each layer to solve for the unknown modal scattering and transmission coefficients. A linear spring model is used to describe the interlaminar adhesive bonding whose effects are incorporated into the global... 

Previously, we have proposed a computational model for decision-making in crisis situations called C-RPD (Computational Recognition Primed Decision). In this paper, a software development process customized for Crisis Situations Decision-Making Systems (CSDMSs) is proposed. Agile processes can skillfully manage uncertainty in software requirements and some of their features like incremental development can solve some problems in developing CSDMSs. However, these processes do not provide comprehensive solutions for issues like the lack of enough knowledge about CSDMSs, very rapid changes, urgent need to overcome security challenges, high development unpredictability, and the performance test.... 

The use of smart and complicated technologies in manufacturing industries has brought new issues to the maintenance systems in recent years. In this research, an intensive literature review is performed to identify and classify these issues. Inspired by the recent advances that Building Information Modeling (BIM) has brought to the construction industry, the research proposes adopting BIM in manufacturing maintenance systems to address the existing issues. A list of BIM capabilities utilized for addressing maintenance issues of buildings is extracted from the literature. It is argued that these BIM capabilities can also solve similar maintenance issues found in manufacturing industries. A... 

This paper reports the design of an optimal controller to prevent suppressvertical vibration due to undesired out of plane excitations generated by environment or gripper during manipulation for a CMOS-MEMS Nano-Newton capacitive force sensor applied for biomedical applications. Undesired out of plane excitations generated by environment or gripper during manipulation is the most prevalent source of vertical vibration in this type of sensors. To suppress the vibrational movement a PZT 5A is used as actuation mechanism. Discrete element method DEM model and Modal analysis were used to find dominant natural frequencies and mode shape vectors. To eliminate out of plane excitation an optimal... 

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a service-oriented manufacturing (SOM) paradigm that provides a dynamic, scalable, and virtualized working ecosystem. The CMfg collaborative structure can be modeled as a hyper-network-based service-demand matching architecture. It is enriched with quality of service (QoS) characteristics to produce customized products in a stable and reliable network. This stability should be considered in the overall manufacturing network mechanism. This paper has provided adaptive strategies utilizing available resources and capacities to enhance the system’s stability and reliability against the unexpected events. The capabilities of the enhanced framework are utilized to... 

Tissue engineering (TE) and regenerative medicine have held great promises for the repair and regeneration of damaged tissues and organs. Additive manufacturing has recently appeared as a versatile technology in TE strategies that enables the production of objects through layered printing. By applying 3D printing and bioprinting, it is now possible to make tissue-engineered constructs according to desired thickness, shape, and size that resemble the native structure of lost tissues. Up to now, several organic and inorganic materials were used as raw materials for 3D printing; bioactive glasses (BGs) are among the most hopeful substances regarding their excellent properties (e.g., bioactivity... 

As one of the most important additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, laser metal deposition (LMD) has been extensively studied specially during the last few years. Similar to other AM techniques, the quality of LMD parts is highly dependent on the processing parameters that need to be optimized so as to obtain geometrically accurate parts as well as favorable microstructures and, thus, mechanical properties. The present review paper therefore aims to present a critical analysis and overview of the relationship between processing parameters, microstructure, and mechanical properties of LMD components made from the Ti–6Al–4V alloy. Moreover, we discuss the applications of LMD parts in the... 

In this paper, an investigation of bi-material parts produced by a two-component metal injection moulding process is presented. The compatibility of different materials for this process was evaluated by sinter dilatometry, taking into account the effects of powder particle size, powder loading and use of master alloys on the sintering behaviour. In a second step, sample material joints of 316L / H13, 316L / 17-4PH and 316L / iron were moulded, debinded and sintered together. The interfaces obtained were examined by optical microscopy and SEM. The diffusion of alloying elements across the interfaces was shown as a function of sintering temperatures. Changes in microstructures and chemical... 

This paper presents a new architecture for a DLL based frequency synthesizer for wireless transceivers. Owing to its DLL based nature, the synthesizer generates the target frequencies with minimum phase noise. The proposed architecture takes the advantage of a combination of a frequency divider and an edge combiner to create the desired frequencies. As an example, the synthesizer is adopted to create the channel frequencies of French DVB-H/T standard. The circuit level design guidelines and power consumption trade-offs are presented. It was shown that for the mentioned standard a mere 6 stage delay line is sufficient. Simulation results confirm the analytical predictions  

Recent advances in material issues for Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) process are presented. The concept is to decrease the powder particle size with the aim of enhancing the sintering kinetics and improving the surface quality of the produced parts. The outcome is particularly suitable for overcoming existing limitations with the rapid tooling, e.g. manufacturing of mould inserts for injection moulding and die casting, by the DMLS process. The powder composition was adapted near to the conventional P/M steels in order to get identical properties with a favourable price. Such novel powder material provides an opportunity to considerably reduce the product development time for P/M... 

The use of solar-powered reverse osmosis desalination systems is a sustainable and environmentally friendly solution in the desalination industry. However, there are some substantial technical and economic challenges due to the intermittency and fluctuation of solar energy. Recent technological improvement and feed-in tariff policies enable these systems to be competitive with conventional grid-connected reverse osmosis systems. In this paper, a feasibility study of the integration of solar panels with the grid to power small-scale reverse osmosis systems (namely up to 2000 m3/day) is conducted in Iran, as a country with a low price of electricity. For this purpose, a city located on the... 

The use of solar-powered reverse osmosis desalination systems is a sustainable and environmentally friendly solution in the desalination industry. However, there are some substantial technical and economic challenges due to the intermittency and fluctuation of solar energy. Recent technological improvement and feed-in tariff policies enable these systems to be competitive with conventional grid-connected reverse osmosis systems. In this paper, a feasibility study of the integration of solar panels with the grid to power small-scale reverse osmosis systems (namely up to 2000 m3/day) is conducted in Iran, as a country with a low price of electricity. For this purpose, a city located on the... 

In aerospace applications structures weight is considered as a major performance parameter. One of the most effective manufacturing methods for weight reduction is superplastic forming. By this technique, not only the weight, but also the stress concentration, the cost, and the manufacturing time are noticeably reduced. Additionally, the components with complicated shapes could be formed in a single manufacturing step. Due to the wide demand for whiskers reinforced metal matrix composites (MMCs) in aerospace industries, many research works have been designed to extend the borders of superplastic forming to MMCs materials. In the present study, a 3-D symmetric micromechanical finite element...