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This article synthesises the return of experience of performing a product variety analysis for a (supplier in the automotive sector) that haven't had yet a product variety management strategy. This paper is part of a multi-year research project on the design of reconfigurable production systems. The contribution is (i) to present at a glance the developed strategy of product similarity assessment and (ii) to underline the industrial benefits of this similarity assessment obtained as a result of the industrial case studies. First, the article reminds, in the context of product variety, a developed methodology to assess product similarities by four indices. These consider the functions, product structures and the way to assemble them. Second, the focus is put on the benefits of their application through three industrial use cases: during the design of a new product identifying its impact on the manufacturing system, identifying the fittest production line for a new product to assemble and generating a new adapted production line by gathering products belonging to the same product family. All benefits are illustrated through the results of the industrial case studies. These are anonymised due to confidentiality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamic and complex nature of development processes calls for improvements in risk management methods. To deal with the risks, the authors advocate for a paradigm shift. The focus is moving from individual risk to risk interactions. Standards suggest integrating methods to address the limitations imposed by existing approaches. As a result, new strategies are needed to express and assess risk connections. The paper proposes a global framework and its simulator for: (a) representing individual risk events and including them in a product development, (b) expressing risk interactions, (c) integrating risks hierarchically and (d) evaluating risks. The solution is based on distinction between individual risk events and global process and its risk behaviour. Risk behaviour is characterised on task level. Process behaviour enables the integration of task risk into the development process. Risk management is viewed as a part of the development process, with final risk assessed bottom-up from individual risk to process risk. Consequently, the main contribution is not only in taking risk interactions into account but also in contextualising risk assessment in relation to development processes. Simulation is conducted for hair dryer design. However, the solution is global and can be used for other manufacturing and development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) were created more than eighteen years ago with the aim of reducing accidents on public roads and saving lives. Achieving this goal depends on VANET mobiles exchanging Road State Information (RSI) with their surroundings and acting on the received RSI. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that transmitted messages are accurately received. This requires controlling the quality of the sharing medium or link while considering Channel State Information (CSI), which provides information on channel quality and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). The process of adjusting the payload based on the CSI is known as Link Adaptation (LA). While several LA works have been published in VANETs, few have considered the effect of relative node mobility. This work presents a link adaptation strategy for VANETs that uses a Neural Network (NN) and the Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm (LMA). While accounting for the Doppler Shift effect induced by the relative velocity, the simulation results demonstrate that the NN approach outperforms its peers by 77%, 115% and 853% in terms of transmitted errors, model efficiency, and throughput respectively, compared to the Cte, ARF, and AMC algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]