International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

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There has been a recent development and explosion of interest among academicians across a wide range of disciplines in the use of virtual Class room. Utilization of the virtual class room as a laboratory experimentation for teaching and learning has increased significantly in recent years as development tools for web based applications have become easier to use and computers have become more capable and less expensive. But, does the virtual class-room improve students learning? Herein we describe the results of two experiments conducted on sections of a Manufacturing and Operation Management course [MIME - 3240] at one of the Colleges of Technology in the Sultanate of Oman during fall semester. Two experiments were designed to determine if student learning of Manufacturing and Operation Management course was significantly affected by two treatments: 1) Virtual class room environment for the students of section S₂ and 2) Real Class-room environment for students of section S₁. The actual final scores of students of section S₁ and S₂ were compared in order to determine the effectiveness of virtual class room on student learning for the Manufacturing and Operation Management course.

In this study Web-based virtual Class room (WVC) is developed to communicate, to share and to disseminate knowledge from the teacher to student. Further, in this study web based tools are also used to create, store, and manage contents of class room instructions and course material .

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This paper presents an overview of new approaches in rapid product development in production networks from design points of view. The manufacturing industries are changing their focus to global sourcing as a means to improve performance and enhance competitiveness. Some partnerships created with this strategy improve product development through collaborative design. With the advent of e-Commerce, a new set of collaborative applications integrated to the firms’ IT infrastructure allow a direct interaction between the firm and its suppliers, having an impact of negotiations. The globalization of the market necessitates the reduction of time-to-market, mainly due to shorter product life cycle. The computing and communication have become indispensable in every aspect of product development and design. The paper describes the network that directly links designer capabilities and with customers and manufacturing division. The networks focuses the three major forces that will affect the design community, namely, speed of decision, expansion of scope and degree of concurrency. Due to evolution of production networks, it has become possible to obtain the mass production within a key short time, using emerging technology that affect the speed and efficiency of product development using a pool of efficient designers and product managers.

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This paper presents a new formulation for warehouse inventory management in a stochastic situation. The primary source of this formulation is derived from FP model, which has been proposed by Fletcher and Ponnambalam for reservoir management. The new proposed mathematical model is based on the first and the second moments of storage as a stochastic variable. Using this model, the expected value of storage, the variance of storage, and the optimal ordering policies are determined. Moreover, the probability of within containment, surplus, and shortage are computable without adding any new variables. To validate the optimization model, a Monte Carlo simulation is used. Furthermore, to evaluate the performance of the optimal FP policy, It is compared to (s*,S*) policy, as a very popular policy used in the literature, in terms of the expected total annual cost and the service level. It is also demonstrated that the FP policy has a superior performances than (s*,S*) policy.

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The manufacturing organizations today are having a competition of supply chain versus supply chain. Existing research work fails to relate human metrics with supply chain performance. The authors intend to empirically assess the effects of human metrics on supply chain performance in the context of Indian manufacturing organizations. A rigorous literature review has identified 12 variables. The variables are individually measured and later on reduced in number by factor analysis. As a pilot study, primary data is collected from 100 manufacturing organizations by means of a questionnaire, both offline and online, which is administered across India and a scale is developed. t-test and factor analysis resulted in 3 factors related to human metrics. The outcomes of the research work provide valuable implications for the Indian manufacturing organizations to understand the factors affecting supply chain performance.

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Manufacturing process frequently employs optimization of machining parameters in order to improve product quality as well as to enhance productivity. The material removal rate is a significant indicator of the productivity and cost efficiency of the process. Taguchi method has been implemented for assessing favorable (optimal) machining condition during the machining of nylon by considering three important cutting parameters like cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut during machining on CNC. The objective of the paper is to find out, which process parameters having more impacts on material removal rate during turning operation on nylon using analysis of variance (ANOVA). An Orthogonal array has been constructed to find the optimal levels of the turning parameters and further signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio has been computed to construct the analysis of variance table. The results of ANOVA shown that feed rate has most significant factor on MRR compare to cutting speed and depth of cut for nylon. The confirmation experiments have conducted to validate the optimal cutting parameters and improvement of MRR from initial conditions is 555.56%.

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One of the goals of the manufacturing industry in the globalisation era is to reduce defects. Due to a variety of factors, the products manufactured in the industry may not be defect-free. Six Sigma is one of the most effective methods for reducing defects. This paper focuses on implementing Six Sigma in the automobile industry's stator motor shaft assembly. The high decibel noise produced by the stator motor is regarded as a rejected piece. Six Sigma focuses on continuous improvement and aids in process optimization by identifying the source of the defect. In the Six Sigma process, the problem is measured and analysed using various tools and techniques. Before beginning this case study, its impact on the company in terms of internal and external customer cost savings is assessed. This case study was discovered to be in a high-impact area. The issue was discovered during the Core and Shaft pressing process. Further research leads to dimensional tolerance, which reduces the defect percentage from 16.5 percent to 0.5 percent.

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The article highlights the development of a Non-Gaussian Process Monitoring Strategy for a Steel Billet Manufacturing Unit (SBMU). The non-Gaussian monitoring strategy being proposed is based on Modified Independent Component Analysis (ICA) which is a variant of the widely employed conventional ICA. The Independent Components(IC) being extracted by modified ICA technique are ordered as per the variance explained akin to that of Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Whereas in conventional ICA the variance explained by the ICs are not known and thereby causes hindrance in the selection of influential ICs for eventual building of the nominal model for the ensuing monitoring strategy. Hotelling T² control chart based on modified ICA scores was used for detection of fault(s) whose control limit was estimated via Bootstrap procedure owing to the non-Gaussian distribution of the underlying data. The Diagnosis of the Detected Fault(s) was carried out by employment of Fault Diagnostic Statistic. The Diagnosis of the Fault(s) involved determination of the contribution of the responsible Process and Feedstock characteristics. The non-Gaussian strategy thus devised was able to correctly detect and satisfactory diagnose the detected fault(s)

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To develop a system for specific purpose, it needs to estimate its parameters (parameterization). It can be used in different fields like engineering, industry etc. In this work, authors used adaptive algorithm to model a system that is applicable in industry for control. This adaptive model is non-linear where its estimation is based on kernel based Least-mean square (LMS) algorithm. The kernel used as Polynomial and Gaussian. As the system is nonlinear polynomial kernel-based algorithm fails to prove its efficacy, though it is of low complexity approach. Gaussian kernel-based application for nonlinear system control performance better as compared to polynomial kernel. Further its complexity is reduced and used for faster performance. The result shows its performance in form of MSE, MAE, RMSE for identification and control that is very useful in industrial application.
 

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