Offshoring manufacturing: Implications for engineering jobs and education: A survey and case study

One result of globalization is the rapid growth of offshoring, i.e., the outsourcing of functions and jobs to offshore locations. In the USA, offshoring has progressed to the point where it already affects everyday lives, from the cars we drive (of which a large portion of the work and components are outsourced) to computers (which are typically manufactured offshore and shipped back to the USA), to electronic diagnostics (where calls are answered overseas). This phenomenon has implications on our lives and on the jobs that engineers and scientists will assume both now and in the future. Further, it is something that all highly developed and even some lesser-developed countries must face. Consequently, the growth of outsourcing will have a major impact on the educational objectives of engineering programs and the resultant engineering curricula worldwide.

This paper presents recent data on product and job offshore migrations and discusses the various dimensions of this phenomenon. In addition to the potential loss of engineering and other high-end technical jobs, sociological and cultural aspects, intellectual property issues, strategic planning concerns, and macro-economic issues are presented. For example, the effects of offshoring on the societal fabric of the countries that are recipients of manufacturing and service center outsourcing, such as China and India, are significant, rapid, and controversial. Offshoring has also begun to change the way that engineering programs in these countries educate their students. In addition, intellectual property issues create a major risk to companies considering outsourcing to certain less-developed countries. These issues can be broadly categorized into: the robustness and strength of intellectual property laws, and the degree to which these laws are implemented and enforced. Further, such factors as currency fluctuations and geo-political conditions can substantially impact outsourcing decisions and profitability.

The phenomenon of offshoring, which is now affecting engineering careers, will play a major role in shaping engineering education worldwide. The next generation of engineers will need to possess the ability to work seamlessly across cultures, have outstanding communication skills and be familiar with the principles of project management, logistics, and systems integration. Some educational models that begin to address these requirements will be presented.     

Worker assignment in cellular manufacturing considering technical and human skills

This paper considers the problem of assigning workers to manufacturing cells in order to maximize the effectiveness of the organization. Organization effectiveness is assumed to be a function of the productivity, output quality, and training costs associated with a particular worker assignment. Traditionally, these worker assignments have been based only on the technical skills of the workers. The proposed model also includes human skills and permits the ability to change the skill levels of workers by providing them with additional training. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem. A total of 32 test problems were developed and varied with regard to the total training time, the available training time for each worker, the training costs, the productivity coefficients and the quality level coefficients. Results indicate that this model provides better worker assignments than one that only considers technical skills.     

A castability expert system

The castability analysis of a part, its cost estimation and preparation of competitive quotations typically requires years of experience, is time consuming and is dependent on the expert personnel available. Considerable amount of personnel time is also involved in preparing these quotations. An expert system is ideally suited for this application as it can automate the castability analysis and the quotation preparation process. This will not only substantially improve productivity and consistency, but also the accuracy of the process. This paper describes the development and implementation of an expert system for a typical medium sized company, which receives approximately thousand requests for quotations every year. A Castability Expert System apart from reducing time and increasing accuracy, will enable people with little experience to analyze the part, estimate cost and prepare quotations without the assistance of an expert, whose time can be better utilized in other areas.     

Computer-aided reverse engineering of the human musculoskeletal system

The objective of this study is to extend the applications of reverse engineering technology from manufacturing industries to the biomedical industry. By obtaining nearly exact geometric data of human tissues, such as bones, tendons, and ligaments, in a high-speed and inexpensive manner, potentially groundbreaking research becomes possible for applications in injury rehabilitation, injury prevention and strengthening. Previous applications of reverse engineering technologies in the biomedical community have dealt largely with prosthetic design and plastic surgery. This study expands this research to include muscular and skeletal applications. The primary advantage provided by scanning technologies is an improved quality of data. Secondly, the time investment for the medical researcher is greatly reduced. And finally, the use of a scanning technology will occasionally provide a less expensive alternative to the medical imaging counterparts. The goal of the research is to develop guidelines and methodologies for reverse engineering human structures.     

Automatic translation of a process level petri-net to a ladder diagram

Major part of discrete industrial automation hardware is controlled by programmable logic controllers （PLCs）. While petri-nets （PNs） have been proposed by many researchers for modelling shop floor discrete control, the majority of the world PLCs are programmed using ladder diagrams （LD） and significant portion of them cannot be programmed using another language. This paper proposes hierarchical approach to translating PN to LD： For describing the high level process, it introduces automatic translation technique of process level PN, while utilizing a recently developed method （for translating PN to boolean logic） for translating the embedded tasks to a LD. Interestingly, the generated LD code enables the reconstruction of the original Petri-net.     

On the development of computer bases path planning strategies for Robotic Spray Glazing

The use of off-line programming is an important step in the implementation of effective CAD-CAM integration. This paper first outlines the tasks involved in the CAD-based off-line programming of spray glazing robots. Different interactive path specification methods and glaze spraying strategies are presented.     

Optimal Selection of Workholding Devices for Rotational Parts

This paper outlines a methodology for selecting the optimal sequence of workholding devices for manufacture of rotational parts, in order to minimize the total workholding time. The algorithm is based on dynamic programming and takes into account the holding surface, the machining surface and the direction of machining in order to specify the optimal plan.     

Attribute-level neighbor hierarchy construction using evolved pattern-based knowledge induction

Neighbor knowledge construction is the foundation for the development of cooperative query answering systems capable of searching for close match or approximate answers when exact match answers are not available. This paper presents a technique for developing neighbor hierarchies at the attribute level. The proposed technique is called the evolved pattern-based knowledge induction (ePKI) technique and allows construction of neighbor hierarchies for nonunique attributes based upon confidences, popularities, and clustering correlations of inferential relationships among attribute values. The technique is applicable for both categorical and numerical (discrete and continuous) attribute values. Attribute value neighbor hierarchies generated by the ePKI technique allow a cooperative query answering system to search for approximate answers by relaxing each individual query condition separately. Consequently, users can search for approximate answers even when the exact match answers do not exist in the database (i.e., searching for existing similar parts as part of the implementation of the concepts of rapid prototyping). Several experiments were conducted to assess the performance of the ePKI in constructing attribute-level neighbor hierarchies. Results indicate that the ePKI technique produces accurate neighbor hierarchies when strong inferential relationships appear among data.