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This study aims to examine factors that determine the adoption of additive manufacturing by small- and medium-sized industries. It provides insights with regard to benefits, challenges and business factors that influence small- and medium-sized industries when adopting this technology. The study also aims to expand the domain of additive manufacturing by including a broader range of challenges and benefits of additive manufacturing in literature.

Using data collected from 175 small- and medium-sized industries, the study has examined through Mann–Whitney test to understand the difference between owners and design engineers on additive manufacturing technology adoption in small- and medium-sized companies.

This study suggests contribution to academic discussion by providing associated factors that have significant impact on the adoption of additive manufacturing technology. Related advantages of additive manufacturing are reduction in inventory cost, lowering the wastage in production and customization of products. The study also indicates that factors such as cost of machinery, higher level of cost in integrating metal components have a negative impact on the adoption of this technology in small- and medium-sized industries.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further in the field of challenges and growth in other areas of application of additive manufacturing, for instance, medical sciences, fabric and aerospace.

The study provides important implications that are of interest for both research and practitioners, related to technology management in small- and medium-sized industries, e.g. foundry and machining industries.

This work/study fulfills an identified need of the small- and medium-sized companies in adopting new technologies and contribute to their growth by understanding the need to accept and implement technology.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how small- and medium-scale companies accept new technologies and factors associated with implementation in the manufacturing process of the organization.

The emergence of distributed manufacturing (DM) is examined as a new form of localised production, distinct from previous manifestations of multi-domestic and indigenous production.

Supply network (SN) configuration and infrastructural provisioning perspectives were used to examine the literature on established localised production models as well as DM. A multiple case study was then undertaken to describe and explore the DM model further. A maximum variation sampling procedure was used to select five exemplar cases.

Three main contributions emerge from this study. First, the research uniquely brings together two bodies of literature, namely SN configuration and infrastructure provisioning to explore the DM context. Second, the research applies these theoretical lenses to establish the distinctive nature of DM across seven dimensions of analysis. Third, emerging DM design rules are identified and compared with the more established models of localised production, drawing on both literature and DM case evidence.

This study provides a rich SN configuration and infrastructural provisioning view on DM leading to a set of design rules for DM adoption, thus supporting practitioners in their efforts to develop viable DM implementation plans.

The authors contribute to the intra- and inter-organisational requirements for the emerging DM context by providing new perspectives through the combined lenses of SN configuration and infrastructural provisioning approaches.

As an advanced manufacturing method, additive manufacturing (AM) technology provides new possibilities for efficient production and design of parts. However, with the continuous expansion of the application of AM materials, subtractive processing has become one of the necessary steps to improve the accuracy and performance of parts. In this paper, the processing process of AM materials is discussed in depth, and the surface integrity problem caused by it is discussed.

Firstly, we listed and analyzed the characterization parameters of metal surface integrity and its influence on the performance of parts and then introduced the application of integrated processing of metal adding and subtracting materials and the influence of different processing forms on the surface integrity of parts. The surface of the trial-cut material is detected and analyzed, and the surface of the integrated processing of adding and subtracting materials is compared with that of the pure processing of reducing materials, so that the corresponding conclusions are obtained.

In this process, we also found some surface integrity problems, such as knife marks, residual stress and thermal effects. These problems may have a potential negative impact on the performance of the final parts. In processing, we can try to use other integrated processing technologies of adding and subtracting materials, try to combine various integrated processing technologies of adding and subtracting materials, or consider exploring more efficient AM technology to improve processing efficiency. We can also consider adopting production process optimization measures to reduce the processing cost of adding and subtracting materials.

With the gradual improvement of the requirements for the surface quality of parts in the production process and the in-depth implementation of sustainable manufacturing, the demand for integrated processing of metal addition and subtraction materials is likely to continue to grow in the future. By deeply understanding and studying the problems of material reduction and surface integrity of AM materials, we can better meet the challenges in the manufacturing process and improve the quality and performance of parts. This research is very important for promoting the development of manufacturing technology and achieving success in practical application.

Exoskeletons are mechanical structures that humans can wear to increase their strength and endurance. The purpose of this paper is to explain how exoskeletons can be used to improve performance across five phases of manufacturing.

Multivocal literature review, encompassing scientific literature and the grey literature of online reports, etc., to inform comprehensive, comparative and critical analyses of the potential of exoskeletons to improve manufacturing performance.

There are at least eight different types of exoskeletons that can be used to improve human strength and endurance in manual work during different phases of production. However, exoskeletons can have the unintended negative consequence of reducing human flexibility leading to new sources of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) and accidents.

Findings are relevant to function allocation research concerned with manual production work. In particular, exoskeletons could exacerbate the traditional trade-off between human flexibility and robot consistency by making human workers less flexible.

The introduction of exoskeletons requires careful health and safety planning if exoskeletons are to improve human strength and endurance without introducing new sources of MSD and accidents.

The originality of this paper is that it provides detailed information about a new manufacturing technology: exoskeletons. The value of this paper is that it provides information that is comprehensive, comparative and critical about exoskeletons as a potential alternative to robotics across five phases of manufacturing.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective and economical management platform to realize real-time tracking and tracing for prepackaged food supply chain based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and finally ensure a benign and safe food consumption environment.

Following service-oriented architecture, a flexible layered architecture of tracking and tracing platform for prepackaged food is developed. Besides, to reduce the implementation cost while realizing fine-grained tracking and tracing, an integrated solution of using both the QR code and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag is proposed. Furthermore, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is adopted to facilitate the information sharing among applications and stakeholders.

The validity of the platform has been evaluated through a case study. First, the proposed platform is proved highly effective on realizing prepackaged food tracking and tracing throughout its supply chain, and can benefit all the stakeholders involved. Second, the integration of the QR code and RFID technologies is proved to be economical and could well ensure the real-time data collection. Third, the XML-based method is efficient to realize information sharing during the whole process.

The contributions of this paper lie in three aspects. First, the technical architecture of IoT-based tracking and tracing platform is developed. It could realize fine-grained tracking and tracing and could be flexible to adapt in many other areas. Second, the solution of integrating the QR code and RFID technologies is proposed, which could greatly decrease the cost of adopting the platform. Third, this platform enables the information sharing among all the involved stakeholders, which will further facilitate their cooperation on guaranteeing the quality and safety of prepackaged food.

Ports are often seen as engines behind regional economic development, because ports attract a variety of economic activities. This paper focuses on the role of ports in global supply chains and the opportunities to attract new economic activities in logistics. The central argument of the paper is that the role of ports as a location for logistics activities evolves with the evolution of logistics concepts. Evidence from West Europe is discussed. With the evolution of logistics concepts towards central coordination and more decentralized physical distribution, ports will see its multinational function diminish, eventually replaced by logistics activities with a more regional function and stronger integrated with production activities. Ports then have to face the competition from inland locations for value added logistics activities. The case of logistics developments provides a basis for analysing the increasingly important questions “What logistics activities ports can attract?” and “What is the appropriate strategy to result in this?”

This paper addresses the trade-off between asset investment and food safety in the design of a food catering production plant. It analyses the relationship between the quality decay of cook-warm products, the logistics of the processes and the economic investment in production machines.

A weekly cook-warm production plan has been monitored on-field using temperature sensors to estimate the quality decay profile of each product. A multi-objective optimisation model is proposed to (1) minimise the number of resources necessary to perform cooking and packing operations or (2) to maximise the food quality of the products. A metaheuristic simulated annealing algorithm is introduced to solve the model and to identify the Pareto frontier of the problem.

The packaging buffers are identified as the bottleneck of the processes. The outcome of the algorithms highlights that a small investment to design bigger buffers results in a significant increase in the quality with a smaller food loss.

This study models the production tasks of a food catering facility to evaluate their criticality from a food safety perspective. It investigates the tradeoff between the investment cost of resources processing critical tasks and food safety of finished products.

The methodology applies to the design of cook-warm production. Catering companies use cook-warm production to serve school, hospitals and companies. For this reason, the application of this methodology leads to the improvement of the quality of daily meals for a large number of people.

The paper introduces a new multi-objective function (asset investment vs food quality) proposing an original metaheuristic to address this tradeoff in the food catering industry. Also, the methodology is applied and validated in the design of a new food production facility.

The flexibility of batch process enables its wide application in fine-chemical, pharmaceutical and semi-conductor industries, whilst its complexity necessitates control performance monitoring to ensure high operation efficiency. This paper proposes a data-driven approach to carry out controller performance monitoring within batch based on linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) method.

A linear time-varying LQG method is proposed to obtain the joint covariance benchmark for the stochastic part of batch process input/output. From historical golden operation batch, linear time-varying (LTV) system and noise models are identified based on generalized observer Markov parameters realization.

Open/closed loop input and output data are applied to identify the process model as well as the disturbance model, both in Markov parameter form. Then the optimal covariance of joint input and output can be obtained by the LQG method. The Hotelling's Tˆ2 control chart can be established to monitor the controller.

(1) An observer Markov parameter approach to identify the time-varying process and noise models from both open and closed loop data, (2) a linear time-varying LQG optimal control law to obtain the optimal benchmark covariance of joint input and output and (3) a joint input and output multivariate control chart based on Hotelling's T² statistic for controller performance monitoring.

This paper aims to overcome the inability of both comparing loss costs and accounting for production resource losses of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)-related approaches.

The authors conducted a literature review about the studies focusing on approaches combining OEE with monetary units and/or resource issues. The authors developed an approach based on Overall Equipment Cost Loss (OECL), introducing a component for the production resource consumption of a machine. A real case study about a smart multicenter three-spindle machine is used to test the applicability of the approach.

The paper proposes Resource Overall Equipment Cost Loss (ROECL), i.e. a new KPI expressed in monetary units that represents the total cost of losses (including production resource ones) caused by inefficiencies and deviations of the machine or equipment from its optimal operating status occurring over a specific time period. ROECL enables to quantify the variation of the product cost occurring when a machine or equipment changes its health status and to determine the actual product cost for a given production order. In the analysed case study, the most critical production orders showed an actual production cost about 60% higher than the minimal cost possible under the most efficient operating conditions.

The proposed approach may support both production and cost accounting managers during the identification of areas requiring attention and representing opportunities for improvement in terms of availability, performance, quality, and resource losses.

The small Brazilian companies are responsible for a large part of national GDP and formal jobs in the country. This expressiveness is contrasted with the specificities of companies of this size possess, including the need to innovate to survive. Research shows that 83 percent of Brazilian SMEs have launched new products and services, obtaining positive results through this innovative process. This competitive advantage is weighted by a great feature of the small organization: resource constraint. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Research was carried out in three stages: one qualitative research (by using focal groups) and another two quantitative research works (descriptive and cross-sectional).

The author identified three factors that are important for teenagers when influencing the purchase of the family car: safety, sportiness and comfort. The identification of these factors shows that the millennial generation tends to emphasize aspects of individual interest, such as status and performance, and family context, such as safety and comfort, rather than social aspects, such as the type of fuel and environmental impact.

The authors recommend the development of automobiles that prioritize the three factors mentioned herein in order to reverse the trend of declining car purchase.

The authors presented the relevant attributes in buying decisions of family cars according to teenagers. The authors also indicated which automobile attributes are relevant for a more informed, connected, and with an increasing purchase power generation in contrast with previous generations, whose social context was prior to the emergence of social media.