Production engineering

About: Production engineering is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2657 publications have been published within this topic receiving 37409 citations.

Additive Manufacturing applications within food industry: An actual overview and future opportunities

Abstract: The food sector is one of the major economic sectors in Europe and beyond and produces nutrition for the world population. Food industry has a unique role in all countries economy as it is essential to people lives. In Europe it is the largest manufacturing sector in terms of value added, turnover and employment. On the other hand, several worldwide economic-social-technological trends are pushing organizations to embrace innovation as an integrated part of their corporate strategy, and to offer customized products tailored to market targets need. Embracing innovation became strategic in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage and to stay ahead of the competition in every industry, even in food one. Today, among all the most cutting-edge technologies, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has the potential to develop business paradigms to face an ever changing demand. AM comprises a group of technologies whose initial inception occurred over thirty years, characterized by a layer upon layer production directly from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data. Over the past few years AM development has increased exponentially and has expanded to include new areas of research. Within all the innovative applications, one of the most promising under respect of social impacts and progress, has proved to be the technological application in the food industry. This scientific work aims at finding out potential touching points between additive manufacturing technologies and food market, either consumer and industrial, focusing on the actual and future applications.

Techniques and Applications of Production Planning in Electronics Manufacturing Systems

Abstract: Electronics industry is a major part of modern manufacturing, and electronic systems play an increasingly important role in a majority of today''s products. Electronic systems are usually implemented with printed circuit boards (PCBs), and, consequently, PCB assembly has become an important sector of the electronics manufacturing industry overall. However, operating effectively in this industry is becoming more diffcult as the companies must compete with high quality standards, rapidly changing technologies, short production cycles, and increasing product variety and complexity. In addition, the capital equipment cost of electronics assembly industry facilities are high in comparison to the usual turnover of a company. As a result, production planning decisions need to made more and more frequently due to continuous changes in the production conditions. In this work we discuss production planning in electronics assembly--and, in particular, in PCB assembly. Our intention is to identify the typical problems arising from production planning and to give a survey of the solution methods suggested in the literature. In addition to this theoretical perspective, we will briefly review applications designed for production planning in PCB assembly. This work is organized as follows: We begin with an introduction to flexible manufacturing systems in general and present a framework for production planning systems in Section 1. Next, we study the fundamentals of PCB assembly process in Section 2 and survey the relevant literature in Section 3. In Section 4 we review existing commercial applications for production planning, and in Section 5 study more closely one of these systems. Finally, in Section 6 we sum up the discussion and outline few important topics for the future research.

Optimizing the order processing of customized products using product configuration

Abstract: For the better part of the 20th century many large companies have been focussed on optimizing their mass production process as a way of maximizing their profits. Nowadays, in the existing environment of global competitiveness, enhancing the production process remains a significant issue as well. Product configuration based on integrated modular product structure and product family architecture has been recognized as an effective means for implementing mass customization. In order to evaluate the effects of product configuration on order processing, a study has been conducted by the Department of Management Engineering and Operations Management of the Technical University of Denmark in cooperation with the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools of the Leibniz Universitat Hannover. Thereby, a product configuration system has been modelled for a manufacturer of mass customized products and its benefits for the order processing have been evaluated.