Geometric Problems in Automated Manufacturing

OPSEARCH ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-50
Author(s):  
R. Chandrasekaran ◽  
Santosh N. Kabadi
Author(s):  
Julia K. Bialek-Waldmann ◽  
Sabine Domning ◽  
Ruth Esser ◽  
Wolfgang Glienke ◽  
Mira Mertens ◽  
...  

Constraints ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Koehler ◽  
Josef Bürgler ◽  
Urs Fontana ◽  
Etienne Fux ◽  
Florian Herzog ◽  
...  

AbstractCable trees are used in industrial products to transmit energy and information between different product parts. To this date, they are mostly assembled by humans and only few automated manufacturing solutions exist using complex robotic machines. For these machines, the wiring plan has to be translated into a wiring sequence of cable plugging operations to be followed by the machine. In this paper, we study and formalize the problem of deriving the optimal wiring sequence for a given layout of a cable tree. We summarize our investigations to model this cable tree wiring problem (CTW). as a traveling salesman problem with atomic, soft atomic, and disjunctive precedence constraints as well as tour-dependent edge costs such that it can be solved by state-of-the-art constraint programming (CP), Optimization Modulo Theories (OMT), and mixed-integer programming (MIP). solvers. It is further shown, how the CTW problem can be viewed as a soft version of the coupled tasks scheduling problem. We discuss various modeling variants for the problem, prove its NP-hardness, and empirically compare CP, OMT, and MIP solvers on a benchmark set of 278 instances. The complete benchmark set with all models and instance data is available on github and was included in the MiniZinc challenge 2020.


Author(s):  
Päivi Heikkilä ◽  
Anita Honka ◽  
Eija Kaasinen ◽  
Kaisa Väänänen

AbstractThe work on the factory floor is gradually changing to resemble knowledge work due to highly automated manufacturing machines. In the increasingly automated work environment, the machine operator’s task is to keep the production running and to solve possible problems quickly. This work is expected to become more autonomous, which raises the importance of supporting the workers’ well-being. An important aspect of that is giving concrete feedback of success at work as well as feedback on physical and mental load. We implemented a smartphone optimized web application, Worker Feedback Dashboard that offers feedback to machine operators about their well-being at work and personally relevant production data as well as their connections to each other. The feedback is personal and based on objective, near real-time measurements. We present the results of a field study, in which ten machine operators used the application for 2–3 months. We studied the operators’ user experience, usage activity, perceived benefits and concerns for the application with questionnaires, interviews and application log data. The operators found the feedback interesting and beneficial, and used the application actively. The perceived benefits indicate impacts on well-being as well as on work performance. Based on the results, we highlight three design implications for quantified worker applications: presenting meaningful overviews, providing guidance to act based on the feedback and refraining from too pervasive quantification not to narrow down the meaningful aspects in one’s work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-5
Author(s):  
Frederic Green

The three books reviewed in this column are about central ideas in algorithms, complexity, and geometry. The third one brings together topics from the first two by applying techniques of both property testing (the subject of the first book) and parameterized complexity (including its more focused incarnation studied in the second book, kernelization) to geometric problems.


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