Cutting Conditions and Work Material State Identification through Acoustic Emission Methods

Summary This paper examines the problem of in-process monitoring of metal cutting operations carried out on aluminum alloys for aeronautical applications. Turning tests were conducted on annealed and heat treated aluminum alloy bars, using carbide tools. For both work material conditions, different combinations of cutting parameters were used. During cutting tests, acoustic emission (AE) and cutting force sensor data were detected and processed. The comparison between AE responses from the annealed and heat treated aluminum alloys allowed, with the help of force sensor data, to verify the applicability of AE and sensor fusion techniques for in-process and real time identification of work ma…

Integrating Manufacturing Equipments Using a Shop Floor Control System

A generic manufacturing system must interact with an environment characterized by a strong competition and by continuous technological changes. For this reason there is the necessity to make the system easily and economically modifiable in its hardware and software configuration. One of the main problems in making a manufacturing system re-configurable concerns its control system which has to be accordingly scalable and object oriented. This paper presents a methodology for making a manufacturing control system actually reconfigurable and adaptable to hardware changes in the manufacturing systems components. In particular, a PC-based shop-floor control system has been realized. Such system …

Off-line Programming and simulation for automatic robot control software generation

In this paper an off-line programming approach for welding robots is presented. The approach is based on the integration of a software tool for robot simulation and an user-friendly interface for automatic generation of the control program. The user can graphically arrange the components in a robotic work-cell and simulate the movements and operations of robotic arms before converting motions and operating sequences in controller-specific tasks. This methodology guarantees high level of flexibility of the robotic system when high variety of work-pieces needs to be welded. The approach has been implemented and tested in a real welding work-cell.

A HEURISTIC APPROACH TO PART BATCHING IN FMS

ABSTRACT A computationally efficient heuristic procedure is presented in order to solve the Part Batching Problem in FMS installations. The procedure is able to deal with the limited availability of tool slots in the storage devices of the machining centers and to evaluate how their capacity affects the overall system performances. A large dimension application is reported and the solution of the problem is tested using a simulator properly worked out.

Possibilistic Programming and Gas for Aggregate Production Planning under Vague Information

In production planning activities, aggregate planning is surely the phase where the lack of information is more relevant. The reasons for that can be summarised in: a) the planning product is an aggregate one, very often not corresponding to actual products; b) the delay from the actual production is relevant so that information regarding actual production resources availability and performances are vague; c) the planning activity is often based on forecasts. On the other hand, all the subsequent production planning activities are based on the result of aggregate planning. In the paper a research going on at the Workgroup for Soft Computing Application in Manufacturing is presented. A Decis…

UML design and AWL programming for reconfigurable control software development of a robotic manipulator

The goal of the presented research is to face the topic of reconfigurable control software development in a concrete fashion, i.e., by presenting a control software system development approach which has been used for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell component. In particular, a methodology for the control software development of a planar robot (2-degrees of freedom) is presented, from the conceptual design to the actual implementation. The methodology suggests UAL and object-oriented modeling and programming techniques for the design phase, while AWL programming language run by a PLC for the implementation phase. The analysis has been conducted consid…

Joining by forming technologies: current solutions and future trends

AbstractThe progressively more demanding needs of emissions and costs reduction in the transportation industry are pushing engineers towards the use of increasingly lightweight structures. This goal can be achieved only if dissimilar and/or new materials, including polymers and composites, are joined together to create complex structures. Conventional fusion welding processes have often been proven inadequate to this task because of the high heat input reducing the joint mechanical properties or even making the joining process impossible. Joining by forming technologies take advantage on the plastic deformation to create sound joints out of even very dissimilar materials. Over the last 25 y…

Lower and Upper Bounds of Manufacturing Cost in FMS

Abstract The use of traditional techniques of product costing, cost control and performance evaluation in advanced manufacturing environment supplies poor results to operations management. In this paper, after a brief review of the major drawbacks of traditional machining economics, a new framework for product costing will be presented. The basis of the proposed approach lies on an analysis of the production process aimed at single out proper cost drivers for the use of the various employed manufacturing resources. As a consequence, the quota of the manufacturing cost of uncertain allocation is drastically reduced. A lower and an upper bound value of the unit production cost are also define…

Cost Analysis of FMS Throughput

Abstract The need for an effective cost planning and control system is stressed in today highly competitive manufacturing environment. The conventional approaches of machining economics to cost analysis are no more able to cope with the new structure of the production costs in the highly automated - highly integrated manufacturing systems. Suitable cost analysis procedures should provide a strong integration between process planning data and overall system performances. The here proposed procedure for the estimate of the unit manufacturing cost in FMSs achieves this integration by using performance evaluation techniques like discrete event simulation or queueing network models.

Relevance of Tool Life Testing for Tool Replacement Strategies

Several analytical and simulation models have been proposed in order to select the optimal tool replacement strategies both in single and multi-tool machining operations. All of these models, however, assume as known the probability density function that describes the stochastic behaviour of tool life. The costly efforts required in order to achieve an accurate estimate of the p.d.f. limits the use in the shop practice of the above models.

Business Process-oriented design of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for small and medium enterprises

In the last few years, many organizations have used business process modelling as an effective tool for managing organizational changes. However, process modelling has rarely been exploited for supporting the entire business process management life cycle. This includes the design of business processes as well as their implementation and control. The adoption and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is a crucial issue if referred to small and medium-sized enterprises. The main problem is that the cost of implementation of ERP, intended as the process of customization of the ERP system towards the actual enterprise business processes, overtakes the cost of ERP acquisit…

An evolutionary approach to multi-objective scheduling of mixed model assembly lines

In this paper a multi-objective genetic algorithm for the scheduling of a mixed model assembly line is proposed, pursuing the line stop time minimisation together with the component usage smoothing. Specific features of the developed GA are step by step random selection of diversified crossover and mutation operators, population control for the substitution of duplicate chromosomes, and in-process updating of GA control parameters. Three different formulation of the fitness function were been tested with some distinct line configurations.

GIA': Giovani, Imprenditoria, Innovazione - "Livatino - Saetta"