John Simmons

Traceability in Manufacturing Systems

Proposes that the role of traceability in manufacturing systems is to enable the history of events to be followed and compared with scheduled plans and predefined goals. Tracing techniques can be used to detect system status (status tracing), analyse system performance (performance tracing) and support decision making (goal tracing). Manufacturing systems are conceptualized as having the levels of strategy, planning and design, and operations. There is a need for all three forms of traceability at each manufacturing system level. The traceabilities approach provides a structured, holistic way of thinking about and designing manufacturing information systems which is not constrained by the physical system or by the narrower requirements of a computer management system.

Assembly planning in a virtual environment

This paper presents novel tools to assist manual assembly in an virtual environment. While assembling virtual components, the users actions are logged and an assembly plan is produced. Prototyping is reduced and concurrency is enhanced using such tools. Successful pilot studies have now been completed.

Designing cable harness assemblies in virtual environments

Abstract Cable harness assemblies are amongst the most costly items in any electro-mechanical product. The domain is not widely recognised as an area for academic research. Internationally, some efforts have been made to automate or semi-automate the choice of cable harness path through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) via CAD systems, but with little success. Common themes voiced are that the problem is too open-ended and it is very difficult to capture the design intent of the activity. Human input is still very much required to guide the computer systems to reach an ‘optimum’ solution. Case study investigations were carried out at five advanced manufacturing organisations to determine the current industrial practice. The investigations revealed that the cable harness design and planning (CHDP) process is essentially sequential in nature and consists of lengthy activities carried out late in the overall product development cycle. It was also found that there has been little attempt to integrate any of the core activities involved. This paper describes work undertaken at Heriot-Watt University to research the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality for designing and routing cable harnesses by enhancing the expertise of the cable harness designer rather than by replacing the individual via an automated system. The new virtual cable design system developed in the course of this work has now undergone some pilot trials to test its usability. The system will subsequently be used to carry out full industrial trials in conjunction with a number of high technology equipment manufacturers. These pilot trials, combined with the case studies of current practice carried out at the companies, have highlighted a number of issues regarding cable design, particularly that immersive VR has a potentially unique role to play in the integration of cable harness electrical and mechanical design activities.

Analysis of conflict and change in construction projects

Conflict and change can have considerable impact on the success or otherwise of construction projects. Examples of conflict and project change have been collected in structured interviews within a series of organizations which are clients of construction activities. A methodology which uses a process of hierarchical decomposition has been developed for classifying this data and rendering it suitable for subsequent analysis. The results presented in the paper are of a prelirninary investigation and lend weight to the hypothesis that the creative management of conflict and change can benefit construction industry clients.

Manufacturing system flexibility: the “capability and capacity” approach

Flexibility is widely recognized, in research literature and in more popular publications, as being of crucial importance in manufacturing. However, there is evidence of confusion among the numerous definitions of flexibility and it is arguable that, even now, the concept is not well understood. Furthermore, there is no simple approach for the systematic incorporation of flexibility level by level within the hierarchy of a conventional manufacturing system. Introduces a unifying and simple set of concepts for flexibility from a management perspective. The purpose of this “capability and capacity” approach is to interpret and integrate various types of flexibility throughout the manufacturing system. Use of this approach leads to four important principles for the integration of a system’s overall flexibility. Analyses flexibility types within manufacturing using the proposed approach.

Cable harness design, assembly and installation planning using immersive virtual reality

Earlier research work using immersive virtual reality (VR) in the domain of cable harness design has shown conclusively that this technology had provided substantial productivity gains over traditional computer-aided design (CAD) systems. The follow-on work in this paper was aimed at understanding the degree to which various aspects of the immersive VR system were contributing to these benefits and how engineering design and planning processes could be analysed in detail as they are being carried out; the nature of this technology being such that the user’s activities can be non-intrusively monitored and logged without interrupting a creative design process or a manufacturing planning task. This current research involved the creation of a more robust CAD-equivalent VR system for cable harness routing design, harness assembly and installation planning which could be functionally evaluated using a set of creative design-task experiments to provide detail about the system and users’ performance. A design task categorisation scheme was developed which allowed both a general and detailed breakdown of the design engineer’s cable harness design process and associated activities. This showed that substantial amounts of time were spend by the designer in navigation (41%), sequence breaks (28%) and carrying out design-related activities (27%). The subsequent statistical analysis of the data also allowed cause and effect relationships between categories to be examined and showed statistically significant results in harness design, harness design modification and menu/model interaction. This insight demonstrated that poorly designed interfaces can have adverse affects on the productivity of the designer and that 3D direct manipulation interfaces have advantages. Indeed, the categorisation scheme provided a valuable tool for understanding design behaviour and could be used for comparing different design platforms as well as examining other aspects of the design function, such as the acquisition of design decision intent. The system also demonstrated the successful automatic generation of cable harness assembly and cable harness installation plans from non-intrusive user-system interaction logging, which further demonstrates the potential for concurrent design and manufacturing planning to be carried out.

Immersive Virtual Reality In Cable and Pipe Routing: Design Metaphors and Cognitive Ergonomics

In recent years there have been moves in industrial engineering towards greater automation through intelligent systems and this has resulted in replacing human expertise. In many cases the potential of intelligent systems has yet to be realised. This paper presents and discusses an alternative technological approach, which uses immersive virtual reality (VR) to support engineering design tasks. The approach focuses on the human engineer and acknowledges the importance of human input to the design process. The development of a metaphor based VR system is reported along with initial field trials, which compare VR with conventional CAD systems. The results show advantages of using VR over CAD and these are discussed along with strengths, weaknesses and future work. @DOI: 10.1115/1.1759696#

Are BPR practitioners really addressing business processes

Business process re‐engineering (BPR), a management tool that initially advocated a revolution in the way businesses are driven, now carries the stigma of being a major cause of job elimination. This study reveals the depth of involvement of BPR practitioners in what, advocates claim, are the fundamental ingredients of BPR – business processes. The data alert the reader to the different understandings and practices related to business process analysis held by several UK and Brazilian companies. Possible reasons are given, accounting for why some of the companies investigated seemed to lose a BPR focus in favour of more urgent restructuring matters. The authors conclude that companies often lack a basic awareness of the business process concept, and that misconceptions about these issues can lead to unrealised expectations at various levels in the organization.

The design and planning of cable harness assemblies

Abstract Bundles of cables known as harnesses are an essential and costly but often overlooked feature of electromechanical systems. This paper describes the problems and difficulties associated with cable harness design and planning and reviews published material on the subject. A case study approach involving a number of advanced manufacturing organizations was used to confirm current industrial practice. Cable harness design and planning is revealed to comprise a sequential, iterative set of lengthy activities carried out late in the overall product development cycle. It was found that there has been little attempt to integrate any of the core activities involved. The paper concludes with a proposal for a new concurrent engineering approach to cable harness design that makes use of an immersive virtual environment within which stages in the process can be addressed.

Case explorations in construction conflict management

Empirical data from recent studies on conflict in construction projects are presented and discussed. Views of conflict management, collected during interviews with a wide range of practitioners, serve to highlight the importance of conflict as a major component in project management strategy in the construction industry. The occurrence of conflict is shown to be a common and often poorly managed phenomenon in modern construction projects, despite real progress in the organization and administration of construction projects. The research demonstrates a need to re-evaluate construction management processes in order to shift the distribution of conflict occurrences from one that peaks during construction to one that peaks in the earlier formative stages of design when the output of conflict is more likely to be creative and complementary to the overall project aims.