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This paper aims to provide a service-based integrated prototype framework for the design of reusable modular assembly systems (RMAS) incorporating reusability of equipment into the process. It extends AutomationML (AML) developments for an engineering data exchange to integrate and standardize the data formats that support the design of RMAS.

The approach provides a set of systematic procedures and support tools for the design of RMAS. This includes enhanced domain knowledge models that facilitate the interpretation and integration of information across the design phases.

The inclusion of reusability aspects in the design phase improves the sustainability of future assembly systems, by ensuring equipment use until its end-of-life. Moreover, the integrated support tools reduce the design time, while improving the quality/performance of the system design solution, as it enables the exploration of a larger solution space. This will result in a better response to dynamic and rapidly changing system requirements.

This work provides a sustainable approach for the design of modular assembly systems (MAS), which will ensure better resource utilization. Additionally, the standardization of the data and the support of low cost tools is expected to benefit industrial companies, particularly the small- and medium-sized enterprises.

This approach offers a service-based platform which uses production data to incorporate reusability aspects into the design process of modular assembly system. Moreover, it provides a framework for modular assembly system design by extending the current design processes and interactions between stakeholders. To support this, a standardized method for information representation and exchange across the several phases of the RMAS design activity is briefly illustrated with an industrial case study.

Automobile maintenance garages require varieties of equipment for their smooth functioning. However, the purchase of the right equipment from alternatives is a tough task as it depends on several economic, technical, and environmental considerations, etc. Moreover, there are different sellers for such equipment, whose features would be satisfying the purchase criteria in varying levels or degrees. Hence, this purchase decision becomes a complex decision-making problem.

An integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach that includes the combination of fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) and GRA (grey relational analysis) is used for the purchase decision-making of garage equipment. Various purchase decision criteria regarding garage equipment are assimilated through literature and interaction with garage professionals. The weightage of each purchase criteria of garage equipment is derived using fuzzy AHP. After the establishment of weights, various equipment suppliers are evaluated according to their conformance to the criteria using the GRA method.

The methodology of FAHP helped in ranking the different purchasing criteria based on their importance. It follows the following sequence: cost of ownership, technical specifications, operational characteristics, reliability and maintenance, after-sales support, commercial features, environmental pollution, and end of life characteristics. GRA methodology has been applied for the purchase of the best common rail test bench among alternatives according to their fulfillment of the purchase criteria requirements that are evaluated by a team of experts.

The integrated approach developed in this work for garage equipment purchase will help garage management to prioritize each supplier of the equipment based on their level of conformance to the purchase criteria.

The purpose of this paper is to explore activities, challenges, and suggest tactics for the design of industrial reconfigurable production systems that can easily adapt to changing market opportunities.

The paper synthesizes the empirical findings of seven case studies including 47 in-depth interviews at four manufacturing companies.

A conceptual production system design process and including activities that enables a long-term perspective considering reconfigurability is proposed. Additionally, critical challenges indicating that reconfigurable production system design is not a trivial issue but one that requires separate control and coordination are identified and tactics to overcome the challenges described.

The authors propose a process for designing reconfigurable production systems that are better suited to adjust to future needs. The knowledge of reconfigurability from the reconfigurable manufacturing system literature is applied in the general production system literature field. This study contributes to a clearer picture of managerial challenges that need to be dealt with when designing a reconfigurable production system.

By clarifying key activities facilitating a long-term perspective in the design process and highlighting challenges and tactics for improvement, the findings are particularly relevant to production engineers and plant managers interested in increasing the ability to adapt to future changes through reconfigurability and improve the efficiency of their production system design process.

Although reconfigurable production systems are critical for the success of manufacturing companies, the process of designing such systems is not clear. This paper stretches this by giving a comprehensive picture of the production system design process and the activities that need to be considered to meet these challenges.

Ethics in IT, community informatics, management.

Undergraduate and postgraduate information technology and citizens' rights, strategic decision making.

This case spotlights Athlete Sports in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). It focuses on the malfunction of the company's equipment that is rented from ABC Sports Equipment. Athlete Sports has been in the UAE over a decade and has positioned itself fairly at the top due to its qualified coaches and quality of facilities it provides. The case highlights the company's transition from owning equipment to leasing equipment that increases profits. However, it also sheds light on ABC Sports' venture into code reusability in order to upgrade equipments faster. The case looks closely at the ultimate consequences of ABC Sports' practice and the impact it has on Athlete's Sports' clients and the subsequent decisions the managers are expected to make.

This case can be used to teach strategic decision making, and ethics in information technology.

A teaching note is available on request.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development of a novel test instrument to quantify the eco‐functional properties of various shopping bags. One of the main properties, which lies at the interface of both ecological and functional properties, is the reusability of shopping bags. Other properties at this juncture also include the impact strength and weight holding capacity of a shopping bag.

The developed tester can be used to assess these three properties (reusability, impact strength and weight holding capacity) of any type of shopping bag. This study discusses the concept and development of an eco‐functional tester for shopping bags. It also reports test results of the reusability, impact strength and weight holding capacity of different types of shopping bags. Reusability and impact strength are expressed by two variants: absolute maximum capability and comparative maximum capability.

According to the test results, plastic bags outscore paper bags in the single use category and woven bags top the reusable bags category.

To date, there is no scientific instrument reported in the literature that quantifies the reusability of different shopping bags. The value of reusability can be directly utilized for LCA calculations. Other functions derived from this instrument are equally important, since they decide the useful life time of shopping bag and they assist the LCA practitioner to decide the functional unit of the study. This unit is the base of any LCA study and upon it comparisons are made.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework and prototype software to use IDEF3 descriptions as a knowledge base from which a queuing network (QN) analysis is performed to compute system performance measures as part of quick response manufacturing. This intends to help domain experts obtain informative quantitative performance measures such as resource utilization, waiting time, and cycle time without relying on a time consuming simulation approach.

A general open queuing network is used to extract the related resource information from the process knowledge captured by IDEF3 method. The relational database is used to integrate the open QN and IDEF3, which also improves the knowledge reusability. In addition, the performance of the open queuing network analyzer (QNA) is compared to the simulation through case studies.

The domain experts usually do not own much technical modeling knowledge. However, through this integration, it is found that they could obtain several meaningful system performance measures without simulation. They could also perform the diverse “what if” scenario analyses with this prototype without difficulties. It is another finding that the system performance measures generated by the open QNA are reasonably close to the values obtained from simulation, articularly when the system utilization is low.

The open QN analysis used in this integration is not as generic as the simulation approach in terms of the modeling scope and capability. Hence, this integration supports only the exclusive OR (XOR) out of three junctions in IDEF3 grammars.

Some system analysis problems do not require a complex simulation modeling approach. Domain experts need a modeling tool to quickly obtain some system dynamics and insights. This integration framework suffices those requirements.

This paper describes the first attempt to generate informative system performance measures from the IDEF3 model using the open QN. It also offers practical help to the domain experts working in the system analysis area.

Despite the importance of emotional variables in shaping individuals' consumption behavior, nature-love still needs to be addressed concerning various aspects of sustainable consumption behavior (SCB). Considering the dimensions of nature-love, this study aims to investigate the effect of passion-for-nature, intimacy-with-nature and commitment-to-nature on SCB. Furthermore, this study aims to incorporate the construal levels of psychological distance (PD) as a moderating variable between the tested variables to add a more in-depth understanding.

Data was collected from a sample of 311 individuals from Egypt using the snowball sampling method and the ten-time rule technique. The data was analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The findings indicate that passion-for-nature and intimacy-with-nature have a significant positive effect on green purchasing, reusability and recycling. On the other hand, commitment-to-nature has a significant positive effect on both green purchasing and reusability. Additionally, a high PD acts as a moderator between the relationships tested. The findings have been discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to integrate PD as a moderator between the relationships tested. Additionally, this paper is the first empirical research investigating these relationships in developing economies.

College and university technology administrators and faculty face an interesting scenario of technology supply and demand. On one hand, the promise of technology for enhanced learning has created a demand from faculty to be provided with cutting‐edge hardware, software, and training aimed at technology implementation into their curriculum. However, education, economy and businesses’ need for technically‐savvy scholars and workers has meant an increase in the supply of students returning to receive education in technology‐related fields. We argue that merging these two in advanced technology courses solves an institute’s need for software and training; it also provides incoming students with an authentic learning environment for appreciating the complex domain of technological tools in education. The creation, development, and implementation of the Physical Science Activity Database is provided to demonstrate that, although this idea is not necessarily new, using Web and database networks enables widespread reusability as well as complexity of learning.

The paper aims to provide an integrated system for collaborative maintenance training of complex equipment based on virtual maintenance and immersive virtual reality environment.

An integrated platform for collaborative virtual maintenance operation and training of complex equipment is developed. The simulation supporting platform for collaborative virtual maintenance is designed with the combined hierarchical structure and modularized members to support the interactive communication of heterogeneous data and information. By analyzing the collaboration mode of multi operators, the maintenance task allocation model, maintenance operation model and Extensible Markup Language‐based object information template are presented.

The research finds that the proposed system is an efficient platform for collaborative maintenance training of complex equipment.

Appropriate and efficient maintenance task allocation and collaborative maintenance operation of multi operators can significantly improve the maintenance efficiency of complex equipment.

A collaborative virtual maintenance training system of complex equipment based on immersive virtual reality environment is presented.

Jetting‐based additive manufacturing processes are gaining attention due to their high speed of operation, accuracy and resolution. Support material plays an important role in the additive manufacturing of parts by using processes that utilise jetting (inkjet) technology. This research aims to present novel support material compositions consisting of methylcellulose (MC) and propylene glycol or butylene glycol. These compositions form gels which are easy to remove and provide the advantage of reusability.

MC was mixed in propylene glycol or butylene glycol in different concentrations and examined for gel formation on heating and subsequent cooling. The viscosity and surface tension of these compositions were measured at temperatures suitable for jetting. Gel strength was characterised using texture analysis.

The viscosity and surface tension values at elevated temperatures (i.e. 800°C) show the suitability of these compositions for jetting‐based additive manufacturing processes. Due to their softness, these gels can be removed easily and their low melting points (i.e. near 500°C) allow their reusability as support materials.

This paper provides a novel approach of using polymer gels as support materials for additive manufacturing processes. These gels are easy to prepare and enhance the sustainability due to their reusability.

Although, MC in water have shown to form gels and these aqueous gels have been used in many applications such as medicine and food industries, the compositions presented in this paper are unique. Such combinations of MC and non‐aqueous solvents (i.e. propylene glycol and butylene glycol) have not been discussed before and provide an early step towards a new application area (i.e. additive manufacturing) for these gels.