Research on Berth-Quay Crane Joint Scheduling Considering Carbon Emission

With the increasing awareness of environmental protection, all walks of life a are paying more and more attention to the carbon dioxide emissions brought by their own industries. For the container terminal, a large proportion of carbon emissions come from the fuel consumption of vessels. In this paper, the consideration of carbon emissions is added to the original berth quay crane joint scheduling problem, and the constraints such as vessel preference for berths and quay crane interference are added. A dual-objective nonlinear mixed integer programming model is established to minimize carbon emissions and minimize costs. The model is solved by the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm with Elite Strategy, and the optimal scheduling scheme is obtained. Finally, the calculation examples are verified to prove the effectiveness and practicability of the model and algorithm.

Design for Agile Manufacturing: Product Design Principles that Enhance Agile Manufacturing of Powertrain Systems

While companies in the entire automotive industry deal with increasing volatility and uncertainty, new trends and innovations pressure especially powertrain margins. The concept of agile manufacturing enables companies to remain competitive in such an environment. As some authors declare that the success of agile manufacturing is largely determined by the design of products, this paper investigates how these two phases in the powertrain lifecycle can be linked. A literature review was conducted to identify DFX guidelines that reflect the agile manufacturing characteristics: flexibility, profitability, speed, proactivity and quality. More than 200 design principles were collected and clustered into seven design objectives according to their main purposes. A first questionnaire was conducted at an engineering company having its main business field in powertrain development in order to define the importance of these principles to enhance agile powertrain manufacturing. The results are presented in a design catalogue. Through an additional literature review the required capabilities of manufacturing systems to fulfill the five agile characteristics were identified. The rating of these capabilities was subject of a second questionnaire at several manufacturing companies in the automotive industry. The employment of a domain mapping matrix supports the selection and application of appropriate product design principles aiming to enhance specific agile manufacturing capabilities. Finally, the developed procedure model was evaluated.

Weight-loss Percentage Improvement of PVC Artificial Leather Products in Automotive Part Industry by Six Sigma

The purpose of this research was to improve the weight-loss percentage of PVC artificial leather products manufactured by the calendering process. It was noticed that the weight-loss percentage was greater than 5% which did not pass the specification given by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Hence, the DMAIC Six Sigma methodology was applied to improve the situation. The cause-and-effect matrix and the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) were adopted to identify the potential factors that affect the quality of the products. After that, the design of experiment (DOE) was used to determine significant factors and optimal parameter settings for the production process to prevent a recurrence. The result shown that the average weight-loss percentage was reduced to only 0.9% after applying new parameter settings.

Cyber Physical System Considering Physical Contacts in Robotic Manipulation for Improving Automation in Food Industry

Population aging in Japan is exacerbating the labor shortage problem in food industry, agriculture, and other labor-intensive industries. Recently, automation and IoT technologies become highly demanded in such industries for improving productivity and labor-saving. This article reviews the challenges of introducing automation in food industry and proposes a cyber physical system framework for applications in food industry. For facilitating the application of IoT technologies, we propose a module integrated with multiple sensors for monitoring the environment and the robotic system conditions. Further, a network platform is proposed to connect the physical space (robotic system) and the cyber space (cloud). Two examples of robotic systems for automatic tempura plating and presentation and chopped green onion topping are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of applying such technologies in food industry.

Extending the Responsibility of Plastic Packaging Purchaser and Producer Companies and Willingness to Conserve the Material Value

Plastics are widely used as the primary material in the production process for packaging products, both flexible and rigid packaging. In 2017, around 900 plastic packaging industries produced plastic packaging with a total of 4.68 million tons in Indonesia. Based on field observations, most plastic packaging products in the market do not follow the design criteria for material value conservation. In addition, the Indonesian legal framework regarding EPR that regulates producers' responsibility in reducing plastic waste already exists but has not been implemented, and there is no obligation to conserve the material values. This research aims to compile a description of the extended producer responsibility and explore the plastic packaging purchaser and producer companies' willingness to realize the material value conservation. Direct observation of 537 plastic packaging samples was carried out to obtain the distribution of samples for the plastic packaging residual value category. In addition, extended responsibility items for the two groups of companies were identified through literature review. From the survey results, the average RWI score of 3.88 indicates that overall, plastic packaging purchaser companies are somewhat willing to conserve the material values, and plastic packaging producers are somewhat willing to conserve the material value with the average RWI of 3.95.

Artificial Immune System Applied to Job Shop Scheduling

Job Shop Scheduling is a problem to schedule n number of jobs in m number of machines with a different order of processing. Each machine processes exactly one job at a time. Each job will be processed in every machine once. When a machine is processing one particular job then the other machine can’t process the same job. Different schedule’s order might produce different total processing time. The result of this scheduling problem will be total processing time and schedule’s order. This paper uses clonal selection as the algorithm to solve this problem. The clonal selection algorithm comes from the concept of an artificial immune system. It's developed by copying a human’s immune system behavior. A human’s immune system can differentiate foreign objects and eliminate the objects by creating an antibody. An antibody will go to a cloning process and will mutate to further enhance itself. Clonal selection algorithm applies this cloning and mutation principle to find the most optimal solution. The goal is to find the best schedule’s order and makespan. Taillard’s benchmark is used to verify the quality of the result. To compare the result, we use two values: the upper bound and the lower bound. The upper bound is used to describe the best result of a scheduling problem that has been conducted using a certain environment. On the contrary, the lower bound shows the worst. Experiments on changing the algorithm's parameters are also conducted to measure the quality of the program. The parameters are the number of iterations, mutations, and clone numbers. According to the experiment's results, the higher the number of iteration, mutation rate, and clone number, the better solution for the problem. Clonal selection algorithm has not been able to keep up with upper bound or lower bound values from Taillard’s case. Therefore, parameters need to be increased significantly to increase the chance to produce the optimum result. The higher number of parameters used means the longer time needed to produce the result.

Study on Ergonomic Analysis of Excavator Cab

Excavators are the leading construction machinery used to mine ore and soil. It has an irreplaceable role in the completion of construction machinery tasks. Given to enable the absolute safety, it is of great necessity to analysis how to make drivers have better driving and operating experience. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the cab of the excavator from the perspective of ergonomics. The cab design that meets the comfort requirements can be beneficial for improving the safety performance and ensuring the high efficiency of the excavator operation.

Wearability and Usability Assessment of Cliff: An Automatized Zipper

Being independent to dress or undress is important for everybody. However, (un)zipping to (un)dress is a task that is difficult for elders, especially when the zipper is in a hard-to-reach location. This paper presents the invention of Cliff: an automatized zipper and a user study performed to evaluate the wearability and how useful it is to the elderly. Results of the user study show that the elderly rated Cliff as wearable, useful, and makes the zipping and unzipping task much easier for them. This prototype system and the feedback received from the elderly contribute to the design of fashionable automated assistive technologies.

Analysis of Dynamic Characteristics of a Propeller Blade Subjected to Large Material Removal in Milling

A propeller blade, as a typical example of low-rigidity components, is prone to chatter and deformation in machining process, especially when large material removal is applied. In order to foresee the problems and then optimize the process, identification of the dynamic behavior of the workpiece is of great importance. This paper studies the dynamic characteristics of the workpiece in the machining process from plate to propeller blade using Finite Element Method. The results show that the time-varying natural frequencies of the workpiece decrease gradually at the beginning steps of the process due to the influence of material removal, and increases afterwards influenced by the geometry of the blade.

Rapid Prototype Design of the Kinetic Sculpture Based on Sketches and Skeletons

The kinetic sculpture is an important aspect of modern urban landscapes and installation art. However, designing such a sculpture needs much time, imagination, engineering knowledge and even rework, which restrains iterations of design and imagination of artists. To allow designers to have a holistic perspective in design, and to simplify and accelerate the design process, we proposed a system to assist designers to build kinetic sculpture digital prototypes from sketches rapidly. The system simplifies the design pipeline as sketch processing, skeleton generation, unit assignment, and motion simulation. Different from other design tools, our system liberates designers from detailed modeling and animation. Therefore, they can focus on perfecting visual effects. User cases show that our system can spark the creativity and accelerate design process both for professional and inexperienced designers, and can generalize the pipeline to other kinetic applications.