Sharif Digital Repository

Simultaneous reductions in inventory of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished items have recently become a major focus in supply chain management. Vendor-managed inventory is a well-known practice in supply chain collaborations, in which manufacturer manages inventory at the retailer and decides about the time and replenishment. In this paper, an integrated vendor-managed inventory model is presented for a two-level supply chain structured as a single capacitated manufacturer at the first level and multiple retailers at the second level. Manufacturer produces different products where demands are assumed decreasing functions of retail prices. In this chain, both the manufacturer and... 

Purpose - This paper aims to present the design and implementation of VirSense, a novel six-DOF haptic interface system, with an emphasis on its gravity compensation and fixed-base motors. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, the design and manufacture of the VirSense robot and its comparison with the existing haptic devices are presented. The kinematic analysis of the robot, design of the components, and manufacturing of the robot are explained as well. Findings - The proposed system is employed to generate a Virtual Sense (VirSense) with fixed-base motors and a spring compensation system for counterbalancing the torques generated by the weight of the links. The fixed bases of the... 

A multi-echelon supply chain design problem concerns the structure of the network and allocation of resources of the company to meet the demand forecast. This paper tries to design a multi-echelon supply chain network with five echelons including supplier, cross-dock, plant, distribution center and representative (customer). For this purpose, a mixed-integer mathematical model is developed to investigate the location of cross-docks, distribution centers, and also allocation between each pair of parties in order to minimize total cost of location and transportation. Due to the complexity of the model, a novel genetic algorithm is developed and applied on a real-world case study of Iran Khodro... 

Governments in developing countries have invested in institutions of higher learning in order to develop homegrown, high technology products. Among these, the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), recognized as a Research University, is actively involved in projects related to medical technology through its various faculties. The net result of these activities is impressing from the point of view of patents and publications, but unfortunately not yet in terms of commercialization. This paper starts by presenting the main obstacles towards the objective of bringing a laboratory prototype to the market in the context of Malaysia. Then, a framework is presented... 

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a method to measure the efficiency of a DMU (Decision Making Unit, e.g. school, public agencies and banks). One of the ways for determining rank of DMUs is efficient score of each DMU. An interesting research issues is to discriminate between efficient DMUs. In literatures, supper efficiency is an applicable method for ranking efficient DMUs. The main drawback of this method is an inability of this method to rank non-extreme efficient DMUs. Therefore, this issue reduces the usefulness of this method. In this paper we propose a new ranking system for non-extreme efficient DMUs (Decision Making Units) based upon the omission of DMUs from reference set of the... 

The brushless dc limited angle torque motor (LATM) has been widely used in areas of aerospace equipments, robot drives, optical scanning systems and any drive systems that require limited motion, ranging from the simple ON-OFF servo valves to the accurate tracking of a reference signal. This paper presents the optimum design procedure of a brushless direct current LATM to satisfy the functional requirements (FRs) and constraints using Independence axiom in axiomatic design (AD) approach. Also, to select the best manufacturing process plan, we consider both cost and thermal performance as two effective criteria, and evaluate available alternatives by computing information content in... 

Inaccuracies in workpiece location lead to errors in position and orientation of machined features on the workpiece, and strongly affect the assemblability and the quality of the product. The accurate positioning of workpiece on a fixture is influenced by rigid body displacements and rotations of the workpiece due to several errors (e.g. geometric radial and position errors in locators and manufacturing tolerances of the workpiece). In this paper, an efficient approach is introduced for analysis and compensation errors in the workpiece-fixture-cutting tool system. A new mathematical formulation of workpiece-fixture modelling is proposed to establish the relationship between the locating... 

In most hub location problem in the literature, the demand is independent of the market share. However, especially about the services and products which are not essential, this assumption does not mirror the reality. Considering the elastic demand increases the complexity and solution of the problem. The elasticity of demand depends on the utility of available hub. For simplicity, we assume that the utility of hub nodes are additive. Utility of the nodes is based on the attraction of the facility on that node and also the decay function of distance. In this paper we propose a new model for hub location problem in an airline industry with elastic demand. In this problem, passengers use hubs... 

Although inventory control under discrete demand in dynamic quantities and time intervals are very common in reality, existing literature has largely ignored them. In this paper, we investigate the inventory control decisions in a two echelon supply chain consists of one vendor and several retailers. The vendor supplies a product to several retailers, buying discrete quantities in pre-determined time intervals. The order quantity and order cycles for each retailer can be different from others. Vendor orders the required quantity from supplier and it'll be immediately received at the vendor's warehouse. In this system, shortage is not allowed for the vendor. The transportation time from the... 

The synergy of fundamental factors like changes in governmental policies, global expansions of the manufacturing industries and improvements in technology related to reliability of manufacturing information flow have created the global manufacturing revolution in the first years of the twenty-first century. Although the concept of global manufacturing enterprise has created benefits and opportunities for todays manufacturing enterprises, it has enforced enterprises to endure costs to adopt the global manufacturing solutions. Besides, considering the researches aimed to enable the global manufacturing paradigm, there is still a need for efficient solutions to fulfil the global product... 

Today, structural Health monitoring is a major concern in the engineering community. Multisite fatigue damage, hidden cracks and corrosion in hard-to-reach locations are among the major flaws encountered in today's extensive diagnosis and/or prognosis of aircraft structures. Ultrasonic waves, lamb waves are particularly advantageous because of their propagation at large distances with little damp in thin-wall structures. In this paper a new rectangular shape array of embedded piezoelectric sensors is developed to detect some damages in large planar structures. An artificial neural network is trained to identify the damage state and its location. Output signals of each sensor due to various... 

Seismic isolators are used to decrease the energy and forces of earthquakes. The weight of conventional steel-reinforced elastomeric isolators (SREIs) is high, mostly due to the use of multiple steel shim plates. On the contrary, the damping ratio of SREIs is relatively low. Accordingly, this research utilizes a new approach in which the steel shim plates are replaced by carbon and polyamide fibers. This study attempts to obtain the dynamic and mechanical properties of such carbon fiber- and polyamide fiber-reinforced elastomeric isolators, in comparison with SREIs. In this work, a number of specimens were initially designed and manufactured. Afterwards, compression and cyclic shear tests... 

In this paper, we have developed a production planning and marketing model in unreliable flexible manufacturing systems with inconstant demand rate that its rate depends on the level of advertisement on that product. The proposed model is more realistic and useful from a practical point of view. The flexible manufacturing system is composed of two machines that produce a single product. Markovian models frequently have been used in modeling a wide variety of real-world systems under uncertainties. Therefore, in this paper, the inventory balance equation is represented by a continuous-time model with Markov jump process to take into account machines breakdown. The objective is to minimize the... 

Functional quality in the mechanical products is governed mainly by the degree of satisfaction of the design requirements, which itself depends on the variations in the effective variables. The functional parameters cannot be easily measured in mass production, and thus, are not usually considered as a direct inspection objective. Process capability indices are useful tools for evaluating the ability of a process to produce the dependent variables of a product that meet certain specifications. In this paper, the conventional process capability concept is extended to develop a computational tool for analysis of the functional quality of a mechanical product. Through defining new proper... 

In this research, a manufacturing facility with independent workstations to remanufacture nonconforming products is investigated. Each workstation is first modeled as an M/M/m queuing system with m being a decision variable. Then, a tri-objective integer nonlinear programming models is developed to formulate the problem. The first objective tries to minimize the waiting times of products, while the second one tries to maximize the minimum reliability of machines at the workstations. Since minimization of the waiting times results in using a large number of machines with higher idle times, the third objective is considered to minimize the mean idle time of the machines. The aim is to... 

By new advancements in vehicle manufacturing, evaluation of vehicle quality assurance has got a more critical issue. Today noise and vibration generated inside and outside the vehicles are more important factors for customers than before. So far several researchers have focused on interior noise transfer path analysis and the results have been published in related papers but each method has its own limitations. In present work, the vibration transfer path analysis and vibration path ranking of a car interior have been performed. As interior vibration is a source of structural borne noise problem, thus, the results of this research can be used to present the structural borne noise state in a... 

One of the most important issues in railway wheels is residual stresses. It is desirable to produce less residual stresses when possible and to decrease the remaining residual stresses in the wheels. The objective of this paper is to provide an estimation of the residual stresses in the rail wheel caused by the stress field from heat treatment process of a railway wheel. A three-dimensional nonlinear stress analysis model has been applied to estimate stress fields of the railway mono-block wheel in heat treatment process. After forging or casting, railway wheels are heat-treated to induce the desirable circumferential compressive residual stress in the upper rim. Finite element analysis... 

In transition from concept design to detail design, designers and engineers need to find specific materials to optimize performance of the systems. The large number of materials and the wide range of manufacturing processes cause engineers always to seek new materials selection methods. In this research work a new method so called QFD method, which employs materials indices, is introduced. The method enjoys a combination of Ashby's materials selection concepts with the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) tool. The QFD method, which is modified here to fit the materials selection field, provides the designer with the required weighting factors for the material indices. Incorporation of House of... 

In this paper we study a two-echelon decentralized supply chain consists of one retailer and several manufacturers in competitive environment. The manufacturers compete on their price and lead time. To model the interactions between the retailer and manufacturers, we use Stackelberg game in which the manufacturers decide on their wholesale price and lead time as leader and the retailer decides on retail price and its order quantity to each manufacturer as follower. Besides, we use the Nash Equilibrium analysis to investigate the horizontal competition between manufacturers to model their simultaneous decision making on their price and lead time. In this problem, the customers' demand is a... 

The design process always has some known or unknown uncertainties in the design variables and parameters. The aim of robust design is minimization of performance sensitivity to uncertainties. Tolerance allocation process can significantly affect quality and robustness of the product. In this paper, a methodology to minimize a product's sensitivity to uncertainties by allocating manufacturing tolerances is presented. The robust tolerance design problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization based on the combined function-uncertainty-cost model. Genetic algorithm is utilized to solve the multi-objective optimization and a case study is presented to illustrate the methodology