Wing Bun Lee

A generic supplier management tool for outsourcing manufacturing

A corporation’s global supply chain usually consists of enterprises and manufacturers that are graphically dispersed around the world, whereby each company is involved in a wide variety of supply chain activities such as order fulfilment, international procurement, acquisition of information technology, manufacturing, and customer service. Therefore, continuously tracking performance of suppliers and an appropriate selection mechanism is one of the crucial activities in supply chain management. This paper presents an intelligent generic supplier management tool (GSMT) using the case‐based reasoning (CBR) technique for outsourcing to suppliers and automating the decision making process when selecting them. The development of GSMT and how the CBR technique is applied is then given, followed by an application of GSMT in Honeywell Consumer Products (Hong Kong) Limited.

A multi-spectrum analysis of surface roughness formation in ultra-precision machining

The formation of surface roughness in ultra-precision diamond turning is investigated using a multi-spectrum analysis method. The features on a diamond turned surface are extracted and analyzed by the spectrum analysis of its surface roughness profiles measured at a finite number of radial sections of the turned surface. It is found that the tool feed rate, the spindle rotational speed, the tool geometry, the material properties, as well as the relative tool-work vibration are not the only dominant components contributing to the generation of surface roughness. The material induced vibration caused by the variation of material crystallography is another major factor. The vibration causes a significant variation of the frequency of the surface modulation of the machined surface. With the use of the multi-spectrum analysis method, it is possible to conjecture the patterns of this vibration as well as to evaluate the properties of the workpiece materials.

Effect of reinforcement in ultra-precision machining of Al6061/SiC metal matrix composites

Abstract The effect of reinforcement on surface generation in diamond turning of Al/SiC metal matrix composites is investigated. The surface generation is affected by the cut through and pulled out mechanisms in cutting the reinforcement. Better surface finish can be achieved with the use of whisker reinforcement and smaller volume fraction of SiC reinforcement.

Development of a case based intelligent supplier relationship management system – linking supplier rating system and product coding system

An intelligent supplier relationship management system (ISRMS) integrating a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, supplier rating system (SRS) and product coding system (PCS) by the case based reasoning (CBR) technique to select preferred suppliers during the new product development (NPD) process is discussed. By using ISRMS in Honeywell Consumer Product (Hong Kong) Limited, it is found that the outsource cycle time from the searching of potential suppliers to the allocation of order, as well as the delay in delivery of goods of suppliers after order allocation, are greatly reduced. In addition, performance of suppliers can be monitored effectively.

Influence of material swelling on surface roughness in diamond turning of single crystals

Abstract The effect of material swelling on the surface roughness in ultraprecision diamond turning has been investigated. Experimental results from the power spectrum analysis indicate that the profile of the tool marks is distorted by the effect of swelling of the materials being cut. A good correlation exists between the surface roughness and the amount of swelling that has occurred in the machined layer. Radically different surface roughness profiles were obtained when machining aluminium and copper single crystals with the same cutting plane and tool shape. The difference in the machining behaviour could not be accounted for by elastic recovery alone but could be explained by considering the plastic deformation induced in the machined layer.

Finite-element analysis of diamond turning of aluminium matrix composites

Abstract In this paper, a transient dynamic finite-element analysis was carried out to investigate the mechanics of diamond turning of an Al6061/SiCp metal-matrix composite (MMC). To achieve closer approximations, 8-noded isoparametric elements have been chosen and employed. The powerful skyline procedure was used for storing the global stiffness matrix in conjunction with LDLT for solving simultaneous equations. The possible four encounters of the tool with the materials in the MMCs have been studied in detail. A new chip-separation criterion suggested in the recent literature has been adopted for the present analysis. The normal and shear stresses are analyzed for all four cases. It has been found that the theoretical findings are consistent with the experimental results and their significance is discussed in the paper.

Multi-facet product information search and retrieval using semantically annotated product family ontology

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation has emerged as an important research topic. The application of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands considerable human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. For instance, an efficient way of retrieving timely information on product family can be useful for tasks such as product family redesign and new product variant derivation when requirements change. However, the current research and application of information search and navigation in product family is mostly limited to its structural aspect which is insufficient to handle advanced information search especially when the query targets at multiple aspects of a product. This paper attempts to address this problem by proposing an information search and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to suggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished. We also exemplify how we can derive new product variants based on the designers query of requirements via the faceted search and retrieval of product family information. Lastly, in order to highlight the value of our current work, we briefly discuss some further research and applications in design decision support, e.g. commonality analysis and variety comparison, based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology.

Multi-agent based virtual enterprise supply chain network for order management

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a network or loose coalition of a variety of value adding services in a supply chain, that unite for a specific period of time for a specific business objective, and disband when the goal is achieved. In this paper, a VE is modeled in which a multi-agent system consisting of four agents, namely interface agent, task agent, information agent, and security agent, together with a case-based reasoning decision support tool, are discussed. To illustrate the usability of the proposed VE architecture, a total order management system (TOMS) developed for a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) is explained.

Learning the Whys: Discovering design rationale using text mining - An algorithm perspective

Collecting design rationale (DR) and making it available in a well-organized manner will better support product design, innovation and decision-making. Many DR systems have been developed to capture DR since the 1970s. However, the DR capture process is heavily human involved. In addition, with the increasing amount of DR available in archived design documents, it has become an acute problem to research a new computational approach that is able to capture DR from free textual contents effectively. In our previous study, we have proposed an ISAL (issue, solution and artifact layer) model for DR representation. In this paper, we focus on algorithm design to discover DR from design documents according to the ISAL modeling. For the issue layer of the ISAL model, we define a semantic sentence graph to model sentence relationships through language patterns. Based on this graph, we improve the manifold-ranking algorithm to extract issue-bearing sentences. To discover solution-reason bearing sentences for the solution layer, we propose building up two sentence graphs based on candidate solution-bearing sentences and reason-bearing sentences respectively, and propagating information between them. For artifact information extraction, we propose two term relations, i.e. positional term relation and mutual term relation. Using these relations, we extend our document profile model to score the candidate terms. The performance and scalability of the algorithms proposed are tested using patents as research data joined with an example of prior art search to illustrate its application prospects.

Faceted search and retrieval based on semantically annotated product family ontology

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation had emerged as an important research area. The use of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands tremendous human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. This paper attempts to address this issue by proposing an information management and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to suggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished based on the semantically annotated camera family ontology. Lastly, we briefly discuss some further research and application in design decision support, e.g. commonality and variety, based on the semantically annotated product family ontology.