STANDARDISING THE DESIGN AND PRODUCTION OF MOORING WINCHES THROUGH MORE COHESIVE REGULATIONS: A NECESSARY STEP

Stricter guidelines, hand in hand with continuous technological advances, mean that vessels are safer and more efficient. At the same time, these changes make ships more complex and expensive. However, this is not the case with mooring equipment. Regulations vary in content, but have the same objective. They fail to improve the ships’ safety and prices are negatively affected. A vessel’s mooring system has to take into account various sets of regulations, including those of the country under whose flag it is sailing; the classification societies; ship owner associations and the terminal ports. This paper will analyse the contents of all these regulations in an attempt to find what they have in common. Its next purpose is to propose guidelines with unified contents. The proposal is to harmonise regulations that affect the mooring winch’s operation, design and construction. With standardised regulations, it would be possible to carry out a single design process and one calculation for components. These steps will be apt for every kind of project. By unifying this process, the final price of manufacturing equipment will be reduced.

ON THE ISSUE OF OPTIMAL PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF WORK IN THE PROJECTS BY MICROELECTRONICS DESIGN CENTERS IMPLEMENTATION

Modern high-tech projects, such as the design and production of microchips, are characterized by a rapid change in the technical and technological base, time constraints in the development and introduction of the product to the market. In such conditions, there is a need for optimal planning and management of the distribution of work.

Optimization of product line considering compatibility and reliability via discrete imperialist competitive algorithm

In the era of mass customization, designing optimal products is one of the most critical decision-making for a company to stay competitive. More and more customers like customized products, which will bring challenges to the product line design and the production. If a company adopts consumers' favorite levels, this may lead to lower product reliability, or incompatibility among the components that make up the product. Moreover, it is worth outsourcing certain attribute levels so as to reduce production cost, but customers may dislike these levels because of their delivery delay. If managers consider the compatibility issue, the quality issue, outsource determination, and the delivery due date in the product design and production stages, it will avoid unreasonable product configuration and many unnecessary expenses, thereby bringing benefits to the company. To solve this complicated problem, we establish a nonlinear programming model to maximize a metric about profit, termed as Per-capita-contribution Margin considering Reliability Penalty (PMRP). Since the integrated product line design and production problem is NP-hard, we propose an improved Discrete Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (DICA) that can find a most powerful imperialist (i.e., solution) by the competition among all countries in the world. The proposed DICA is compared with genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) through extensive numerical experiment, and the results show that DICA has more attractive performance than GA and SA.