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This study aims to characterise the so-called Sialkoti paper used to produce Pahari drawings preserved today in the Wereldmuseum in Leiden (Netherlands) (WML). These works originate from the Punjab Hills in India (today Himachal Pradesh) and are commonly known as 'Pahari miniature paintings'. The paper upon which these drawings are executed is said to have been produced in Sialkot during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when papermaking was an integral part of an overall regional economy correlated with other sectors such as agriculture and the textile industry. Although the term Sialkoti refers to identified papermills in Sialkot (now Pakistan), the paper from this region is yet to be subjected to a systematic study. This article therefore explores the paper(s) in question through macro- and microscopic observations of structure, pulp and fibres. The study of historical sources, complemented by the analysis of paper samples and fibre identification, has revealed that the pulp would have been prepared from a variety of manufactured products using different technologies, such as rags, cloth, mats, rope and other plant-based materials made from local bast fibres which, once tattered, were recycled to prepare the pulp. Microscopic study reveals that a variety of fibre combinations under different conditions and processing steps were used, in particular sunn hemp fibre (Crotalaria juncea L.), a plant species that has until now rarely been identified in historical paper. In addition, the presence of kenaf and jute fibres, as well as a significant quantity of cotton fibres, have also been demonstrated. To overcome the lack of comparative materials, our work was supported by a comparative study of several materials made from sunn hemp now held in the Ethnobotany Collection at Kew Gardens. Samples were taken from these materials and provided useful reference micrographs for the identification of the WML samples. The quality of the paper used by Pahari artists, as well as the raw materials available and their processing, are discussed in detail. Putting all the data, including technical and historical information into perspective, we conclude that the Pahari artists used a paper of inferior quality compared to other types of paper used for other purposes such as the creation of illuminated manuscripts in the Punjab plains. This study therefore provides useful analytical and material evidence that complements previous historical, technical and anthropological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previously unreported line patterns visible under ultraviolet light were observed on a proportion of plain white A4 printer/copier paper from different manufacturers. These Ultraviolet Line Patterns (UVLPs) usually appear as stripes down the vertical length of the paper. Typically, the UVLPs were found to “repeat” through the ream in a predictable way, while also changing. It is postulated that the repeating nature of the UVLPs is a result of the way that paper is manufactured. This leads to the ability to sequence the sheets compared to their original source paper. Even in the absence of UVLPs, it is possible to use our observation of the manufacturing process to anticipate the order of several sheets of paper and conclusively associate them, in some cases, by physically fitting their machine cut edges and crossing paper fibers. Such a novel approach to examining questioned documents would be highly useful in forensic casework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global demand for paper-based products continues to increase amidst challenges with raw material supply to the pulp industries. Considerable efforts to discover new wood resources from tropical forests to widen the material stock are ongoing. This study examined the suitability of the outer and inner wood fibres from different axial sections (i.e., butt, middle and top) of Chrysophyllum albidum from a moist semi-deciduous forest in Ghana for paper production. The fibre morphology and derived indices [i.e., Runkel Ratio, Slenderness Ratio, Flexibility Coefficient, Coefficient of Rigidity, Luce's Shape Factor and Solids Factor] were determined using the methods by the International Association of Wood Anatomist. C. albidum inner and outer wood fibres were generally long and thin with wide lumen. The fibre-derived indices were similar to those of many popular paper-producing timbers such as Acacia mangium and Pinus sylvestris. The fibre morphology and derived indices of C. albidum meet the recommended thresholds for fibres for manufacturing writing and printing papers with good tearing and bursting strength properties. Thus, the wood's fibres would be suitable for producing papers with good strength properties. Its utilization will contribute to expanding the raw material sources for the pulp and paper industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The projects commissioned to Guarino Guarini by the Order of Regular Theatine Clerics left a mark of his extraordinary ability to blend rationality and lucid imagination of geometric shapes in which the close relationship between art and science stands out. Most of realized buildings have been demolished or destroyed because of catastrophic events. Therefore, the problem of knowledge of such manufactured products arises increasing and integrating the available data with those newly acquired in emergency situations. This paper proposes a digital platform aimed to analyze and catalogue Guarini's heritage; the data sheets can be shared and easily implemented. A special section is dedicated to buildings no longer existing. The aim of this project project is to allow the faithfuls, visitors and the Fathers of the Order themselves to be able to "review" and "relive" the Theatine lost architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There is a growing interest in realizing the benefits of continuous processing in biologics manufacturing, which is reflected by the significant number of industrial and academic researchers who are actively involved in the development of continuous bioprocessing systems. These efforts are further encouraged by guidance expressed in recent US FDA conference presentations. The advantages of continuous manufacturing include sustained operation with consistent product quality, reduced equipment size, high-volumetric productivity, streamlined process flow, low-process cycle times, and reduced capital and operating cost. This technology, however, poses challenges, which need to be addressed before routine implementation is considered. This paper, which is based on the available literature and input from a large number of reviewers, is intended to provide a consensus of the opportunities, technical needs, and strategic directions for continuous bioprocessing. The discussion is supported by several examples illustrating various architectures of continuous bioprocessing systems. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the American Pharmacists Association J Pharm Sci 104:813-820, 2015 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying life cycle assessment (LCA) early in the development of technologies is essential to anticipate potential unforeseen environmental consequences. Modelling the lifecycle of a complex product is nevertheless challenging, as the data required is usually scarce. The approach presented in this paper integrates product entropy into end-of-life modelling for LCA. This enables anticipating the fate of a product after its end-of-use leading to a more realistic allocation of environmental impacts. The approach is demonstrated for the case study of recycling traction batteries with emerging traction battery cell chemistries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this paper we introduced a model for prognosis of profit of industrial enterprises. This model gives a possibility to make a prognosis of profit of these enterprises with account increasing of quantity of manufactured products, as well as various expenses of enterprises (raw material purchase costs, transportation costs, ...). Design/Methodology/Approach: An analytical approach for analyzing of the influence of changing of various parameters on the profit of industrial enterprises has been introduced. Findings: The model gives a possibility to decrease risk of decreasing of profit due to decreasing of overhead expenses. Practical Implications: The model gives a possibility to make the prognosis of profit with account changing of quantity of manufactured products, as well as various expenses (raw materials, transportation costs, ...). Originality/Value: In this paper we introduce a model for prognosis of profit of industrial enterprises with account of changing the volume of manufacturing production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to document and analyze the long arc of connectivity between China and Latin America. First, using analytical international trade and economic tools, we provide a new economic perspective of the First Globalization–-the Ming and early Qing China's economic and business links with Latin America and Europe. Second, due to U.S. government trade policies toward China in the 1990s, the Second China's Globalization was ushered in with its entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO). During this second phase, China exchanged manufactured goods with minerals and resources from Latin America. Finally, the tough technology and trade stance by the Trump and Biden Administrations prompted China to intensify the third phase of China interaction with Latin America. For the 2020s and beyond, one important pillar of the Third China-Latin America-Europe Globalization is heightened efforts for China to increase its digital-AI, telecommunication and platform business presence and access into the Latin American markets. To enrich our analysis, we will provide Chinese-style digital-AI business and economic models to help illustrate our discussions. Throughout our paper, we want to point out that government policies were instrumental in bringing forth these Three Globalizations that involve China-Latin America-Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing industry often uses 3D scanning technologies to inspect their products. Some of these techniques produce a point cloud that represent a section of the manufactured product. The clouds must be aligned to the model of the product in order to check its quality. Current registration methods are usually affected by dimensional problems or volumetric anomalies. This paper proposes a new method for the registration process aligning the cloud to the model in several steps. The first step is the state-of-the-art method. The second step uses the information acquired in the first one to perform a fine registration in order to not being affected by dimensional defects or little miss alignments in the previous step providing a huge improvement in the measurement of surface defects. In this paper, several techniques are proposed in order to provide a set of tools that the final users can tune to fit their needs. The whole procedure of registration can be run in real-time conditions using the sampling and caching strategies proposed. The methods proposed are tested over more than 10,000 profiles of a rail proving they successfully align the cloud and the model providing better results in the measurement of surface defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increase in manufactured products has progressively generated industrial waste and, thus, the post-consumption waste, which is not adequately disposed of. Regulation and sustainability strategies have been considered as a solution to this problem, in which social, environmental and economic gains have been the main goals. Sustainability issues integrated into the main businesses and operations within the supply chain have been considered in all stages of product design to make them more sustainable. Hence, this study aimed to describe the current state of the art regarding Sustainable Design and Reverse Logistics integration, to identify the potential factors that allow for this combination and report the challenges and opportunities by means of a systematic literature review. We elaborated a systematic review protocol, which stated the inclusion and exclusion criteria for selecting publications regarding the integration between Sustainable Design and Reverse Logistics, from 2008 to 2017 and considered ten research questions as guidelines to collect information from the selected papers. Our final sample comprised of 19 papers and we verified that there are several gaps regarding the integration of the two concepts since most of the research considered indirect integration relations and they do not account for Reverse Logistics activities at the end of the product's life cycle. Therefore, we proposed three frameworks that highlight this integration and expands the Design for Reverse Logistics perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Additive manufacturing also known as 3D printing is an evolving advanced manufacturing technology critical for the new era of complex machinery and operating systems. Manufacturing systems are increasingly faced with risk of attacks not only by traditional malicious actors such as hackers and cyber-criminals but also by some competitors and organizations engaged in corporate espionage. This paper aims to elaborate a plausible risk practice of designing and demonstrate a case study for the compromised-based malicious for polymer 3D printing system. Design/methodology/approach: This study assumes conditions when a machine was compromised and evaluates the effect of post compromised attack by studying its effects on tensile dog bone specimens as the printed object. The designed algorithm removed predetermined specific number of layers from the tensile samples. The samples were visually identical in terms of external physical dimensions even after removal of the layers. Samples were examined nondestructively for density. Additionally, destructive uniaxial tensile tests were carried out on the modified samples and compared to the unmodified sample as a control for various mechanical properties. It is worth noting that the current approach was adapted for illustrating the impact of cyber altercations on properties of additively produced parts in a quantitative manner. It concurrently pointed towards the vulnerabilities of advanced manufacturing systems and a need for designing robust mitigation/defense mechanism against the cyber altercations. Findings: Density, Young's modulus and maximum strength steadily decreased with an increase in the number of missing layers, whereas a no clear trend was observed in the case of % elongation. Post tensile test observations of the sample cross-sections confirmed the successful removal of the layers from the samples by the designed method. As a result, the current work presented a cyber-attack model and its quantitative implications on the mechanical properties of 3D printed objects. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the original work from the team. It is currently not under consideration for publication in any other avenue. The paper provides quantitative approach of realizing impact of cyber intrusions on deteriorated performance of additively manufactured products. It also enlists important intrusion mechanisms relevant to additive manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, China's foreign trade has continued to develop and achieved remarkable results, and the economic development trend has been steady and positive overall. However, although there are new opportunities for the development of China's foreign trade, it also faces new challenges and dilemmas. Therefore, in the current international trade situation, it is of great significance to study the impact of China's foreign trade on industrial structure and find the key points for the development of endogenous economic dynamics on this basis. China's industrial structure has undergone a clear process of upgrading and is a major trading country for industrially manufactured goods. The results of the analysis of the subsectors show that the trend of structural upgrading within the industry is equally significant. At the same time, there is often a significant trend of synergistic changes in the percentage of processing trade and the percentage change of trade in high-tech products. Based on this, this paper analyzes the correlation between China's foreign trade structure and industrial structure based on the correlation of mutual influence. The evolutionary algorithm has the advantages of a strong ability to search for global optimal solutions and good robustness, which is applied as the core algorithm of this paper. The study in this paper examines the interaction between industrial structure and trade structure from the perspective of matching the association between industrial structure and trade structure on the basis of measuring the industrial structure and trade structure at the regional level. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the model in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people can be successfully employed in most production processes, provided that one knows how to exploit their abilities and take into account their limitations in order to give them an appropriate job. However, because the level and type of production must be constantly adapted to the needs of the market, the involvement of disabled people in the production process may also change. Additionally, people with disabilities have limitations as well as additional rights that must be considered. As a result, the organisation and planning of their work, side by side with other employees, becomes more complex. Computer simulations can be a support for organising and planning the involvement of employees with disabilities in production processes. The aim of the article is to show how simulations can facilitate the organisation of work of employees with disabilities, with the changing demand for manufactured products. The paper identifies the factors that should be considered, and then presents how the employment of disabled people can affect the operation of the production line and the commercial image of the company. The study uses a combination of System Dynamics and Discrete Event Simulations. The relevant data for the simulation were derived from a production company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Examination of Ricoh's Communication Products. [Extracted from the article]

This paper classifies the internal and external factors that influence the effectiveness of integrated internal audit management (IIAM) and how IIAM effectiveness affects business sustainability performance. This paper presents a meta-analysis and systematic literature review of previous academic research papers. This study used a comprehensive review of literature and content analysis to obtain information using the electronic databases, specifically ProQuest, Emerald and Scopus from the year of 2003 until 2020. The paper reviewed recently published articles on the integration of at least two out of three management systems (MSs), such as ISO 9001, OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001. The findings from the research papers are presented according to the factors and outcomes examined. Many studies undertaken on the integration audit of management systems show that there are several internal factors (human resource capability, technological capability and quality capability) and external factors (regulator, customer and supplier) that affect the effectiveness of the integrated internal audit management. It is concluded that the use of integrated management system (IMS) has a positive impact on the firm's performance specifically on business sustainability. The findings indicated of internal and external factors, which are grounded on the identified theories (dynamic capabilities theory, stakeholder theory and contingency theory), having to consider and to understand the effectiveness and implications of integrated internal audit. Thus, based on the findings from previous research carried out and the requirement of IMS, this paper gives directions for the effective way to integrate internal audits in manufacturing firms to achieve business sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changeable manufacturing and platform-based co-development of products and manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly relevant for industrial manufacturing in order to respond to volatile markets, increased product variety and shorter product life cycles. However, in order to conduct platform-based co-development, it is necessary to manage the relations between the product domain and the manufacturing domain. This paper proposes an approach and meta-model for developing company-specific ontologies, which can be used for modelling the portfolio of components, processes and equipment and their interrelations as a basis for co-evolution. Developing such a model has implications for developing and utilising changeable manufacturing, which is also analysed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the spatial variation in variety of manufactured consumer goods to study how choice fades across space. We use data on 132 consumer goods and over 800 brands available from a purpose‐designed survey of fixed shops and periodic market stalls in towns and villages in Ethiopia. We find that local consumer choice fades, with fewer varieties in remoter villages. On average, these villages have approximately half the number of available items compared to their nearest market town. A fall in travel time of a half‐hour is associated with 4 extra goods and 9 brands. Variety also increases with inequality and market size. Furthermore, we estimate a model of heterogeneous consumers with a preference for variety and monopolistically competitive traders to disentangle the role of transport costs from the taste for variety, and to assess the consequences for prices. Our model estimates suggest that local consumer prices contain a markup of 8% above source town prices and transport costs. We demonstrate the significant costs to consumers from both low variety and high trade costs. Ignoring such costs means that poverty is underestimated in remote places. In turn, when infrastructure investments raise variety, the likely fall in poverty will be underestimated too. This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE "house journal" is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Andualem Mengistu is a researcher at the IGC, LSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development is currently being applied in most fields of research. Procurement, focused on the buyer–supplier dyad, is one such discipline where sustainability is being widely applied. This paper provides a review of these research studies, conducting a systematic content analysis in order to present the state of the art in this domain. The paper carries out a detailed review of articles in international scientific journals and well-known international conferences related to green and sustainable supplier selection published between 2008 and 2014 inclusive. Seven designed research questions are proposed and answered based on this bibliography. Interesting results are reported in each section and gaps in the current body of literature are identified. The purpose of this review is to provide important future directions and limitations in this research topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, pressure from various stakeholders has forced many companies to establish environmental and social improvements both in their company and their supply chains. The growing number of journal publications and conference proceedings confirms this change also in academia. The aim of this paper is to analyse and review scientific literature on sustainable supplier management (SSM) with a focus on formal models supporting decision-making in sustainable supplier selection, monitoring and development. For this purpose, a framework on SSM is proposed and a comprehensive content analysis including a criteria analysis is carried out. Beyond this, in total 143 peer-reviewed publications between 1997 and 2014 have been analysed to identify both established and overlooked research fields. Major findings are the rapidly growing interest of this topic in academia in recent years, the predominance of Analytic Hierarchy Process, Analytic Network Process and fuzzy-based approaches, the focus on the final evaluation and selection process step and the rare investigation of social and quantitative metrics. This review may be useful for practitioners and scientists as it outlines major characteristics in this field, which can serve as a basis for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining high levels of process quality is crucial to the competitiveness of manufacturing firms in today's increasingly global marketplace. To ensure the quality of manufactured products meets customer needs, process capability indices (PCIs) are widely used to analyze the process performance of various processing characteristics. Products characterise by processing characteristics of both unilateral and bilateral specifications are common in the current sales market. Manufacturing firms must often adopt multiple PCIs to analyze the process performance of a single product, which is inefficient in practical applications and management. Yield-based index C p k is not subject to this limitation. For this reason, we employed C p k to evaluate process performance and the effectiveness of improvement measures. In practice, C p k is estimated from samples, which means that misjudgment may occur in the assessment of process performance and improvement effectiveness due to sampling errors. We therefore derived the 100 (1 − α) % confidence interval of C p k and, based on the producer's perspective, used the upper confidence limit to evaluate improvement effectiveness. To lower the risk of misjudgment and increase the reliability of improvement effectiveness in the case of data uncertainty, this paper further proposes fuzzy estimation using the right-sided confidence interval of C p k and develops the fuzzy judgement model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing complexity of production systems and manufactured products, operators face high demands for professional expertise and long-term concentration. Augmented reality (AR) can support users in their work by displaying relevant virtual data in their field of view. In contrast to the extensive research on AR assistance in assembly, maintenance, and training, AR support in quality inspection has received less attention in the industrial context. Quality inspection is an essential part of industrial processes; thus, it is important to verify whether AR assistance can support users in these tasks. This work proposes an AR-based approach for quality inspection. For this, pilot AR software was designed and developed. The proposed AR approach was tested with end users. The task efficiency, the error rate, the perceived mental workload, and the usability of the AR approach were analysed and compared to the conventional paper-based support. The field research confirmed the positive effect on user efficiency during quality inspection while decreasing the perceived mental workload. This work extends the research on the potential of AR assistance in industrial applications and provides experimental validation to confirm the benefits of AR support on user performance during quality inspection tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fixtures play a significant role in ensuring the quality of products in manufacturing engineering. The paper considers fork-type parts that have a complex spatial configuration and needs to be machined by drilling-milling-boring equipment in one setup. In fixture design, it is necessary to provide wide tool accessibility, and therefore the choice of locating surfaces of the workpiece is an important step. The mathematical approach for determining the coordinates of contact points between the workpiece and the locating and clamping elements fixtures in the coordinate system is developed in this paper. The geometric parameters of the workpiece are taken into account in determining the coordinates. It allows to apply the proposed approach for parts of another standard size, but the same design and technological features. The technology of augmented reality is an effective tool at the design stage of fixtures and allows to visualize the developed fixture configurations. This approach has been successfully applied for such parts as levers, connecting rods, flat parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, research has mainly discussed the definition and classification of producer services. Yet many companies require an integrated solution of products and producer services. The aim of this paper is to propose a model of the ecological evolution of manufacturing service systems (MSS) driven by service providers. This model adopts modular thinking to integrate dispersive producer services into an entire MSS, the process of which forms the ecological evolution of MSS. This paper applies ecological theory to build the ecological evolution mechanism of MSS. In this mechanism, the predator-prey relationship is used as a metaphor for the relationships between manufacturers and service providers in a MSS. A predator-prey model is built to simulate the ecological evolution of MSS. A predation cellular genetic algorithm is adopted to optimise this evolution. The proposed model and algorithm are demonstrated and validated by a case study of MSS in bicycle industry. This study contributes to theory by proposing and clarifying the mechanism for provision of services between businesses. The future research will focus on the application and empirical analysis of this mechanism derived from big data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transformation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) allows Industry 4.0 and the internet of things (IIoT) to make significant advancements in automating, controlling, and improving the quality of numerous manufacturing processes. Three-dimensional (3D) surface topography of manufactured products holds important information about the quality of manufacturing processes. Surface topography consists of unique properties, which makes the current monitoring approaches ineffective in identifying local and spatial surface faults. In this paper, we develop a generalised spatially weighted autocorrelation approach based on AI for monitoring changes in products based on their 3D topographic surfaces. We propose two effective algorithms to identify and assign spatial weights to the topographic regions with suspicious characteristics. The normal surface hard thresholding algorithm initially enhances the representation of surface characteristics through binarization, followed by the normal surface connected-component labelling algorithm, which utilises the obtained binary results to identify and assign spatial weights to the suspicious regions. We then introduce a generalised spatially weighted Moran index, which exploits the assigned weights to locally characterise and monitor changes in the spatial autocorrelation structure of identified regions. After an anomaly surface is detected, we extract different fault diagnostic information. The proposed approach proves its robustness and efficiency in characterising, monitoring, and diagnosing different patterns of faults in 3D topographic surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circular economy, a modern and current concept, represents a concrete solution to practically support sustainable development. Moreover, circular economy is considered as one of the most representative answers to the need to efficiently and sustainably manage the problem of resources and waste generated by the production and consumption processes. The current paper which is prevalently theoretical and empirical, aims to identify the existence and meaning of the relationship between marketing mix and circular economy, starting from the hypothesis that the traditional marketing mix needs an adjustment to the requirements of circular economy. In fact, we propose to reconsider the traditional marketing mix by adding a 5th component to the established 4Ps: product, price, promotion, placement. By means of the analysis and synthesis of the literature, correlated with the authors’ proposal, the new component added to the marketing mix is the ”return” and refers to the new sustainable and responsible way to use the waste resulted from consumption. Thus, the main outcome of the paper, the 5th component that is ”R”, is analysed and developed based on the specialty literature and of the studies that support circular economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, the electromagnetic field of the microwave range has been successfully introduced into various branches of the agribusiness industry as one of the most promising and advanced technologies for drying manufactured products. In this regard, the article proposes a new microwave irradiation technique for drying various objects based on a surface waveguide's properties. The paper analyses the main links that make up the surface waveguide as a microwave irradiation system and shows the ways of their implementation. The article describes the advantages of applying a vibratory device for exciting a surface wave, using a re-emitting antenna array, and operating a single conductor with a dielectric coating as a surface waveguide. Such advantages make it possible to introduce microwave drying units with the required distribution of electromagnetic field energy along the irradiated material, small dimensions, high drying quality, and low price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing industry often faces challenges related to customer satisfaction, system degradation, product sustainability, inventory, and operation management. If not addressed, these challenges can be substantially harmful and costly for the sustainability of manufacturing plants. Paradigms, e.g., Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, provide effective and innovative solutions, aiming at managing manufacturing operations, and controlling the quality of completed goods offered to the customers. Aiming at that end, this paper endeavors to mitigate the described challenges in a multi-stage degrading manufacturing/remanufacturing system through the implementation of an intelligent machine learning-based decision-making mechanism. To carry out decision-making, reinforcement learning is coupled with lean green manufacturing. The scope of this implementation is the creation of a smart lean and sustainable production environment that has a minimal environmental impact. Considering the latter, this effort is made to reduce material consumption and extend the lifecycle of manufactured products using pull production, predictive maintenance, and circular economy strategies. To validate this, a well-defined experimental analysis meticulously investigates the behavior and performance of the proposed mechanism. Results obtained by this analysis support the presented reinforcement learning/ad hoc control mechanism's capability and competence achieving both high system sustainability and enhanced material reuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many real-world optimization problems involve uncertainties, and in such situations it is often desirable to identify robust solutions that perform well over the possible future scenarios. In this paper, we focus on input uncertainty, such as in manufacturing, where the actual manufactured product may differ from the specified design but should still function well. Estimating a solution’s expected fitness in such a case is challenging, especially if the fitness function is expensive to evaluate, and its analytic form is unknown. One option is to average over a number of scenarios, but this is computationally expensive. The archive sample approximation method reduces the required number of fitness evaluations by reusing previous evaluations stored in an archive. The main challenge in the application of this method lies in determining the locations of additional samples drawn in each generation to enrich the information in the archive and reduce the estimation error. In this paper, we use the Wasserstein distance metric to approximate the possible benefit of a potential sample location on the estimation error, and propose new sampling strategies based on this metric. Contrary to previous studies, we consider a sample’s contribution for the entire population, rather than inspecting each individual separately. This also allows us to dynamically adjust the number of samples to be collected in each generation. An empirical comparison with several previously proposed archive-based sample approximation methods demonstrates the superiority of our approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: In this paper, the anisotropy of the mechanical properties of additively manufactured products was investigated. When carrying out a lightweight design, considering the anisotropy during manufacturing, it can provide accurate performance estimates for subsequent manufacturing. The research object of this paper was the space node, which is very suitable for lightweight design because of its complex force. However, this method can also be used for those products that need to consider the performance after manufacture, especially in mass production, whereby the most suitable molding direction can be found using this method. At present, a large number of scholars have conducted related research on topology optimization for additive manufacturing (AM). However, there are few relevant research reports on the impact of different directions of additive manufacturing on the optimal design and manufacturing results. In this paper, using the bidirectional evolutionary optimization (BESO) method, anisotropic optimization analysis was carried out on space nodes that are currently popular in the field of additive manufacturing and topology optimization. The elastic constants in different directions were used as anisotropic material properties for optimization research in this paper through tensile testing, which was carried out on 316L stainless-steel specimens fabricated using Selective Laser Melting (SLM) technology. In addition, SEM analyses were performed to explore the microscopic appearance of the material. The study found that additive manufacturing is affected by the printing direction in terms of both macroscopic mechanical properties and microscopic material structure; the deformation obtained by anisotropic optimization was about 1.1–2.3% smaller than that obtained by isotropic optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]