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The purpose of this paper is to apply the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology in order to reduce the rejections experienced in the manufacturing of the doors belonging to a telecommunication cabinet.

The process involved joining of sheet metal and hinge using welding operations with the help of a fixture. The methodology used is the structured DMAIC method in order to identify the root cause for the rejections and solve it.

The paper provides insights about the identification of the root cause for the defects and the solution to overcome it, and also the benefits that were obtained as a result of the application of the solution.

This methodology has been applied to the variation observed in the dimensions of a particular component to be welded with a main part. This approach can be used to find such dimensional variations.

This study has been successfully carried out in a medium-scale industry which has total quality management in practice.

Six Sigma DMAIC was necessary for the identification and reduction of the defects which arose in the sheet metal and welding operations, and had to be resolved in order to increase the bottom-line.

Various occupations in life require personnel to stand for a prolonged period of time. This causes excessive stress on the joints leading to musculoskeletal disorders. This paper aims to design an equipment ensure the personnel rests on whenever necessary.

The method followed in this paper is the adoption of Karl Ulrich’s product design methodology with suitable modifications as per requirement. Human anthropometric data from the Indian population has been considered during the design and modelled according to it using computer aided design and computer aided engineering tools.

The conceptual equipment – exoskeleton designed sustained loads of human beings and proved to be a safe design in terms of the strength of the material used in the design.

This design can serve as equipment, which helps the personnel with long-standing work hours to relieve themselves without actually sitting.

The design has been carefully crafted based on the inputs from the anthropometric features of human beings, which is completely passive in nature i.e. no use of external power is required for this exoskeleton compared to the other available designs.

In certain industrial operations, workers are required to stand for a prolonged duration. This leads to muscular fatigue in the legs, posing a threat to the productivity and well-being of the workers. This paper aims to address this problem of women in the clothing industry with an exoskeleton designed for lower extremities and improve productivity.

Ulrich’s product design approach has been followed with suitable modifications. The methodology involves a study to justify the need for this product and terminating at the physical and virtual evaluations of the product. Required anthropometric parameters are considered along the design process.

The exoskeleton discussed in this paper is an innovative product made of Aluminium 6061 alloy. During the simulation phase of the product, total von-mises stresses to a part bearing 1 leg were 31.5 MPa, 94.7 MPa and 284 MPa for aluminium, SS308 and springs, respectively. These values are below the yield limit by a great margin. Based on a user survey of this product, 72% of the targeted customers were interested in buying. Also, comparing electromyography (EMG) mean value of the voltage between workers’ leg with and without exoskeleton revealed that there was an improvement in the voltage by 2.5% when exoskeleton was used.

This paper emphasizes, for the first time – the necessity of an exoskeleton indigenized for the Indian population and the process of realizing it by designing an exoskeleton.

This research aims to enhance the operational excellence and continuous improvement of the retail supply chain in the Saudi Thobe Factory through an integrated approach of Six Sigma DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) with artificial intelligence (AI).

The study identified the tailoring department as the department with maximum defects by using voice of customer and critical to quality tools. An AI-integrated Six Sigma approach was applied to identify and eliminate nonproductive stages, and a new facility layout was designed to enhance productivity and customer satisfaction.

The use of the factor rating method and simulation using Arena software led to an improved sigma level from 1.597 to 2.237, representing an increment of about 40%. Additionally, the defects per million opportunities reduced from 461,538 to 230,769. The study can help production industry management to optimize facility layouts and improve overall production line efficiency.

This study addresses the lack of published research on the use of an integrated approach of Six Sigma DMAIC with AI in the retail and distribution sector of Saudi Arabia, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The study demonstrates how this approach may significantly boost SMEs’ performance and provides a basis for future research in this area.

This study provides a practical example of how an integrated approach of Six Sigma DMAIC with AI can be used in the retail and distribution sector of Saudi Arabia to enhance operational excellence and continuous improvement. The study highlights the potential benefits of this approach for SMEs in the region and provides a framework for future research.

Coronavirus disease 2019 is one of the novel diseases formed by a dreadful virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. Various countries are affected by this viral disease, and many countries declare a lockdown with several rules and conditions. To prevent this rapid viral transmission, various researchers have introduced different mobile applications. This paper aims to study issues like viral transmission, mortality rates, vaccination rates, etc. and also provides suitable solutions based on the statistical analysis with the assistance of the Six-Sigma Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control (DMAIC) concept.

Statistical analysis is done for different countries, and the required solutions are provided by using the DMAIC procedure. This application has the ability to represent the current risk status of the user and notify them to secure themselves.

The proposed work suggests the Aarogya Setu application to prevent large viral transmission by affording many preventive measures. This application also issues the current risk status of each individual user. Hence, it gives improved results in avoiding high viral transmission.

The proposed six-sigma DMAIC concept also affords the control measures to prevent viral transmission. Hence, the suggested application has the highest chance of avoiding the rapid viral transmission.

Real-time implementation of sophisticated algorithms on robotic systems demands a rewarding interface between hardware and software components. Individual robot manufacturers have dedicated controllers and languages. However, robot operation would require either the knowledge of additional software or expensive add-on installations for effective communication between the robot controller and the computation software. This paper aims to present a novel method of interfacing the commercial robot controllers with most widely used simulation platform, e.g. MATLAB in real-time with a demonstration of visual predictive controller.

A remote personal computer (PC), running MATLAB, is connected with the IRC5 controller of an ABB robotic arm through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP server on the IRC5 responds to a request from an FTP client (MATLAB) on a remote computer. MATLAB provides the basic platform for programming and control algorithm development. The controlled output is transferred to the robot controller through Ethernet port as files and, thereby, the proposed scheme ensures connection and control of the robot using the control algorithms developed by the researchers without the additional cost of buying add-on packages or mastering vendor-specific programming languages.

New control strategies and contrivances can be developed with numerous conditions and constraints in simulation platforms. When the results are to be implemented in real-time systems, the proposed method helps to establish a simple, fast and cost-effective communication with commercial robot controllers for validating the real-time performance of the developed control algorithm.

The proposed method is used for real-time implementation of visual servo control with predictive controller, for accurate pick-and-place application with different initial conditions. The same strategy has been proven effective in supervisory control using two cameras and artificial neural network-based visual control of robotic manipulators.

This paper elaborates a real-time example using visual servoing for researchers working with industrial robots, enabling them to understand and explore the possibilities of robot communication.

Infrastructure adds pace and efficiency into India’s progress. It is a country which has embraced the notion of a knowledge economy of late, and thus raised the importance of infrastructure consulting per se. The study aims to cover the consequent but underexplored role of organizational structure (OS) vis-à-vis knowledge retention (KR) in this sector.

For conducting the research, the sampling organization that has been chosen is an infrastructure consulting organization. The researchers had undertaken an exploratory study to find out the dynamics between OS and KR. A qualitative approach has thus been adopted and the application of thematic analysis found place in conducting the research. The themes and sub-themes generated from the research, aligned with the theoretical backdrop, gave rise to a schematic model explaining the relationship between OS and KR.

From the above themes and sub-themes along with possible relationships which emerged from the study, the researchers observed that the theme “organizational structure” had a significant relationship with the sub-theme “knowledge retention”. In the order, what was the most noteworthy was that designing of an OS had a refined and somewhat directed influence on KR in the organization.

This paper tries to uncover the relationship between an organization’s structure formation and the key aspect of knowledge management cycle, which is KR. This shall be helpful for both academics (who can make advancements by testing the relationship in other contexts) and practitioners (who can look forward to minimizing business losses through the concept of KR).

Inconel 718 (IN718) is a high-performance nickel-based superalloy with high oxidation-corrosion-temperature resistance, high strength (tensile, fatigue, creep and rupture), durability, toughness, hardness and dimensional stability, which is difficult to machine with traditional fabrication methods. To overcome these difficulties, wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM), one of the modern manufacturing methods, is used.

Main performance criteria in WEDM; material removal rate (MRR), cutting speed, surface roughness, cutting width (kerf) and wire wear rate. In this study, the effect of processing parameters on kerf and MRR because of processing IN718 in WEDM was investigated. Machining parameters, voltage, wire feed rate and dielectric fluid pressure were determined. Deionized water was used as a dielectric fluid and 0.3 mm brass wire was used as wire in the experiments. Gray Relational Analysis (GRA), which is one of the multi-criteria decision-making methods, has been applied for the optimization of the machining parameters in the cutting process with the WEDM. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine the effect percentages of the cut-off parameters.

The parameter with the highest effect was determined as tension with a rate of 76.95% for kerf and 91.21% for MRR.

The novel approach uses Taguchi-based GRA optimization as a result of cutting IN718 with WEDM, reducing cost and time consumption.

This paper aims to improve the performance of a two-camera robotic feedback system designed for automatic pick and place application by modifying its velocity profile during switching of control.

Cooperation of global and local vision sensors ensures visibility of the target for a two-camera robotic system. The master camera, monitoring the workspace, guides the robot such that image-based visual servoing (IBVS) by the eye-in-hand camera transcends its inherent shortcomings. A hybrid control law steers the robot until the system switches to IBVS in a region proven for its asymptotic stability and convergence through a qualitative overview of the scheme. Complementary gain factors can ensure a smooth transition in velocity during switching considering the versatility and range of the workspace.

The proposed strategy is verified through simulation studies and implemented on a 6-DOF industrial robot ABB IRB 1200 to validate the practicality of adaptive gain approach while switching in a hybrid visual feedback system. This approach can be extended to any control problem with uneven switching surfaces or coarse/fine controllers which are subjected to discrete time events.

In complex workspace where robots operate in parallel with other robots/humans and share workspaces, the supervisory control scheme ensures convergence. This study proves that hybrid control laws are more effective than conventional approaches in unstructured environments and visibility constraints can be overcome by the integration of multiple vision sensors.

The supervisory control is designed to combine the visual feedback data from eye-in-hand and eye-to-hand sensors. A gain adaptive approach smoothens the velocity characteristics of the end-effector while switching the control from master camera to the end-effector camera.

Fiber networks represent a vast class of materials, which can be modeled by representing its microstructure using one-dimensional fiber embedded in three-dimensional space. Investigating the statics, dynamics and thermodynamics of such structures from computational first principles requires the efficient estimation of cohesive-repulsive energies and forces between interacting fiber segments. This study offers a fast, efficient and effective computational methodology to estimate such interactions which can be coupled with Hamiltonian mechanics to simulate the behavior of fibrous systems.

This method preserves the uniformly continuous distribution of particles on the line segments and utilizes adaptive numerical integration of relevant distance-distribution functions to estimate the effective interaction energy and forces.

This method is found to be cheaper to compute and more accurate than the corresponding discrete scheme. This scheme is also versatile in the sense that any pair-wise interaction model can be used.

The scheme depends on the availability of a suitable pair-interaction potential, such as a Lennard-Jones potential or Morse potential. Additionally, it can only be used for systems which are purely fibrous in nature. For example, fiber composites with a non-fibrous matrix are not addressed.

Paper, woven and hair can be represented as purely fibrous at some relevant length scales and are thus excellent candidate systems for this scheme.

This paper presents a novel method which allows rapid and accurate implementation of an otherwise computationally expensive process.