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Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element meshing and remeshing from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. Topics such as adaptive techniques for meshing and remeshing, parallel processing in the finite element modelling, etc. are also included. The bibliography at the end of this paper contains 1,727 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with presented subjects that were published between 1990 and 2001.

Refurbishing may be the most practical approach under the low volume production. This effort aims to achieve robotic laser cladding with the main purpose of achieving maximum processing flexibility, predictably high quality, lower maintenance and operating costs. This study aims to focus on online measurement and cladding path generation toward automatic laser cladding.

Based on the specific requirements of automatic laser cladding, an approach was proposed toward an automatic laser cladding with powder injection for the refurbishment of components with free‐form surfaces. This study assessed the feasibility of integrating a non‐contact free‐form surface measurement system, an industrial robot, and an algorithm for generating cladding tool paths seamlessly.

3D laser scanning and laser cladding systems can be embedded into an existing robot motion control system. Online measurement based 3D surface reconstruction is a practical approach toward cladding tool path generation for on‐site refurbishment.

Robotic laser cladding may be a potential application by integrating other measurement devices, such as temperature sensor based monitoring system.

Refurbishing worn‐out components could have significant economic benefits. This study indicates that robotic laser cladding may potentially facilitate improved refurbishment of oversized components.

This paper deals initially with a new algorithm for generating automatically, from solid models of mechanical parts, finite element meshes that are organized as spatially addressable quaternary trees (for 2D work) or octal trees (for 3D work). Because such meshes are inherently hierarchical as well as spatially addressable, they permit efficient substructuring techniques to be used for both global analysis and incremental re‐meshing and re‐analysis. The paper summarizes the global and incremental techniques, and presents some results from an experimental closed loop 2D system in which meshing, analysis, error evaluation, and re‐meshing and re‐analysis are done automatically and adaptively. The paper concludes with a progress report on a 3D implementation.

This research aimed to develop an automatic 3D body measurement line generation method that reduces errors induced by diverse body shapes and incomplete scan areas.

Three-dimensional body scan data from the 5th Size Korea database were used. Measurement extraction methods were developed for each measurement; chest girth, underbust girth, armscye girth and neck base girth.

The research showed that the method adopted in this study enhanced the accuracy of the scan measurements for various body shapes and incomplete scan data. The authors verified the accuracy of the developed methods for various body shapes by comparing the scan measurement against manual measurement.

The automatic 3D body measurement line generation algorithms developed for various human body shapes will improve the reliability and accuracy of 3D body scan measurement program. Also. it will be of practical use in human-size-related production processes.

This paper presents an algorithm for automatic generation of graded initial quadrilateral meshes targeted for the finite element analysis of metal‐forming processes. Meshing the domain geometry deals with a universe of shapes, and the procedure therefore takes into account the initial geometry of the billet. A grid‐based approach is utilised for generating an initial coarse mesh with well‐shaped (internal) elements, and in cases where non‐rectangular shapes are to be discretized, linking with the boundary is performed on the basis of constrained Delaunay triangulation. By analysing the contact situation between dies and mesh, an attempt is made to identify regions where plastic deformation is likely to be concentrated during the early stages of processing, and accordingly refinement of the mesh is performed locally by elemental subdivision. Simulation examples for closed‐die forging, forward rod and backward can extrusion substantiate the feasibility of this approach in terms of lowering the overall calculation error and limiting the interference between mesh and die.

Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean and in particular Chinese, are beginning to gain popularity in the information retrieval (IR) domain. The quality of IR systems has traditionally been judged by the system’s retrieval effectiveness which, in turn, is commonly measured by data recall and data precision. This paper proposes and describes a process for generating an automatic Chinese thesaurus that can be used to provide related terms to a user’s queries to enhance retrieval effectiveness. In the absence of existing automatic Chinese thesauri, techniques used in English thesaurus generation have been evaluated and adapted to generate a Chinese equivalent. The automatic thesaurus is generated by computing the co‐occurrence values between domain‐specific terms found in a document collection. These co‐occurrence values are in turn derived from the term and document frequencies of the terms. A set of experiments was subsequently carried out on a document test set to evaluate the applicability of the thesaurus. Results obtained from these experiments confirmed that such an automatic generated thesaurus is able to improve the retrieval effectiveness of a Chinese IR system.

This article features an interview with Jane Greenberg, Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms Greenberg discusses metadata education, her research projects, and the future of the Semantic Web. She describes the Metadata Generation Research and Automatic Metadata Generation Applications projects, the ways library school curricula have changed and will likely change in the near future, and the influence Dublin Core has had on her career.

The aim of this study is to develop an in-depth case study on the implementation on Lean six sigma (LSS) in Schnell S.p.A., Italian company leader of an important multinational industrial group, highlighting the benefits that can be achieved from a careful application of this method, the main challenges and organizational learning from its implementation.

The study has been developed with a qualitative approach, creating a single in-depth case study, with the participant observation of researchers in the project which lasted 4 months. Periodic weekly meetings were done with the working group to exchange feedback on the development of the project to share opinions and data.

A project has been developed to stabilize the procurement process of a pull-type production cell, which experienced delays in supply lead times. The causes of the problems in their process of managing the supply of the production cell were found and some inefficiencies in the internal process of fulfillment of supply orders have been intercepted, the optimization of which has allowed the generation of an automatic system for sending supply orders, coming directly from the production line.

This study described the path and dynamics of the transformation process that business organizations undertake for optimizing their profitability and competitive advantage, placing emphasis on an innovative methodology for conducting business process improvement projects, which constitutes its operating philosophy on the effective and efficient use of company resources and skills, to guarantee to the company the achievement of a lasting and defensible competitive advantage over time.

A synopsis is presented of the numerical finite element methodology currently in use at the Institute for Computer Applications (ICA) for the simulation of industrial forming processes. The development of the method is based on the inelastic properties of the material with an extension towards the inclusion of elastic effects and accounts for the thermal phenomena occurring in the course of the deformation. An essential constituent of the computational procedure is the treatment of the unsteady contact developing between the workpiece material and the tool during forming, and of the associated friction phenomena. Automatic mesh generation and variable discretization adaptable to the development of the numerical solution are of importance for industrial applications. These aspects are presented and discussed. Furthermore, solution techniques for thermomechanically coupled problems are considered and investigated with respect to their numerical properties. Application to industrial forming processes is demonstrated by means of three‐dimensional hot rolling and of superplastic sheet forming.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient hybrid method that can collectively address assembly sequence generation (ASG) and exploded view generation (EVG) problem effectively. ASG is an act of finding feasible collision free movement of components of a mechanical product in accordance with the assembly design. Although the execution of ASG is complex and time-consuming in calculation, it is highly essential for efficient manufacturing process. Because of numerous limitations of the ASG algorithms, a definite method is still unavailable in the computer-aided design (CAD) software, and therefore the explosion of the product is not found to be in accordance with any feasible disassembly sequence (disassembly sequence is reverse progression of assembly sequence). The existing EVG algorithms in the CAD software result in visualization of the entire constituent parts of the product over single screen without taking into consideration the feasible order of assembly operations; thus, it becomes necessary to formulate an algorithm which effectively solves ASG and EVG problem in conjugation. This requirement has also been documented as standard in the “General Information Concerning Patents: 1.84 Standards for drawings” in the United States Patent and Trademark office (2005) which states that the exploded view created for any product should show the relationship or order of assembly of various parts that are permissible.

In this paper, a unique ASG method has been proposed and is further extended for EVG. The ASG follows a deterministic approach to avoid redundant data collection and calculation. The proposed method is effectively applied on products which require such feasible paths of disassembly other than canonical directions.

The method is capable of organizing the assembly operations as linear or parallel progression of assembly such that the assembly task is completed in minimum number of stages. This result is further taken for EVG and is found to be proven effective.

Assembly sequence planning (ASP) is performed most of the times considering the geometric feasibility along canonical axes without considering parallel possibility of assembly operations. In this paper, the proposed method is robust to address this issue. Exploded view generation considering feasible ASP is also one of the novel approaches illustrated in this paper.