Use of ANP weighted crisp and fuzzy QFD for product development

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a popular planning method often used to transform customer demands/requirements into the technical characteristics of a new or improved product or service. In order to better capture (and represent) the multifarious relationships between customer requirements and technical characteristics, and the relative weights among customer requirements, in this study a hybrid analytic network process (ANP)-weighted fuzzy methodology is proposed. The goal is to synthesize renowned capabilities of ANP and fuzzy logic to better rank technical characteristics of a product (or a service) while implementing QFD. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed methodology a real-world scenario, where a new equipment to squeeze the polyethylene pipes to stop the gas flow without damaging the pipes, is developed. The ranking of technical characteristics of the product is calculated using both crisp and fuzzy weights for illustration and comparison purposes.     

Safety-based availability assessment at design stage

The availability of a system or equipment is one of the crucial characteristics that measures the customer satisfaction and strongly influences his final choice decision between concurrent products. The aim of this work is to provide an approach to improve the products availability assessment by taking into account the safety criteria by considering the use situations at design stage. Our work focuses on the routine design of complex products. The availability is often simply estimated considering reliability and maintainability. Basically, the intrinsic availability is the probability that it is operating satisfactorily at any point in time when used under conditions stated by design specifications. The time considered includes operating time and active repair time. Thus, intrinsic availability excludes from consideration all other times in the product lifecycle such as: accident management time, storage time, administrative time or logistic time. But many studies show that the loss of availability performance is also due to accidents that occur in different unforeseeable utilization situations. This engenders stops of the system to ensure the users safety according to standards recommendations. In this purpose, we consider the structural product architecture and the different use cases that correspond to the operational states and downtimes due to stop events that may happen during the utilization like failures, maintenance tasks and accidents. Then, we propose a product behavioral analysis including the use cases to describe interactions between the product and users or maintenance operators. We use Markov chains to model the use cases corresponding to operating time (OT), maintenance time (MT) and preparing time after accidents (RT). Then these three parameters are considered to specify a generic approach to improve the availability assessment. Such an approach provides the traceability of the product behavior along its lifecycle. In this way, the main causes of stop can be identified and this may guide the designer for improving the availability of the product future versions. To validate our approach, an application is presented considering a printing line. The comparison of our simulation considering an industrial case study shows a good agreement about the influence of safety on the availability.     

A minimal kinematic model for serial robot calibration using POE formula

Traditional methods based on the product of exponentials (POE) formula are parametrically continuous and complete for the calibration of the kinematic parameters of serial robots. However, these methods are not minimal due to the constraints of joint twists. This paper puts forward a new POE-based model, whose parameters are totally independent and conform to the formula of minimality. This is the first model that simultaneously satisfies the requirements of parametric continuity, completeness, and minimality with uniform and generic modeling rules. The proposed approach avoids the operations of normalization and orthogonalization which are necessary redundancy elimination steps with the traditional model. Simulations on a SCARA robot and experiments on an ABB IRB 120 robot prove that the new model outperforms in convergence, accuracy, and efficiency.     

Present it like it is here: Creating local presence to improve online product experiences

Advanced online product presentation technologies such as virtual mirrors enable consumers to experience products like they are actually present with them in the real world. This study is one of the first to address the mechanism underlying this phenomenon. Inspired by literature on media technology the concept of local presence is put forward and applied to the online consumer behavior domain. A key objective of this paper is to examine whether local presence adds to our understanding of how emerging product presentation formats influence online product experiences. To this end, a laboratory experiment (N = 366) was conducted with product presentation format as a three level (pictures, 360-spin rotation, and virtual mirror) independent variable, allowing for a comparison of the effectiveness of different presentation formats in creating perceptions of local presence. As a second objective, the influence of local presence on perceptions of product tangibility and product likability, two key facets of the online product experience, were assessed. The results, obtained with the use of analysis of variance and partial least squares modeling, show the superiority of the virtual mirror in creating local presence, and demonstrate that local presence is highly predictive of product tangibility and product likability. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

A highly stable and efficient catalyst for direct synthesis of LPG from syngas

Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) fuel was directly synthesized from syngas over a hybrid catalyst which contained a methanol synthesis catalyst and zeolite. The new hybrid catalyst composed of (Pd–Ca/SiO₂) and β-zeolite, showed a high activity and selectivity for LPG production. X-ray diffraction (XRD) characterization of the catalyst was used to analyze the deactivation of (Pd–Ca/SiO₂)/β-zeolite.     

干气密封在LPG装车泵上的应用

干气密封是一种用于高速旋转设备的非接触式密封。近年来随着技术发展,其制造成本降低,开始在低速离心泵上应用。液化石油气(简称LPG)装车泵因压力瞬变和环境影响而工况恶劣,造成该类泵密封使用寿命短,液化气泄漏严重。干气密封的应用彻底改变了装车泵的运行状况,同时大大改善了现场环境。     

强化质量意识 提高市场竞争力

介绍了企业在面临国际陶瓷市场竞争激烈的形势下，努力转变发展思路，拓宽市场，强化质量意识。根据市场变化，生产适销对路搞档优质陶瓷产品，增强产品的市场能力，提高了企业的经济效益。     

Ontology-based similarity for product information retrieval

Product development of today is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. Specifically, design teams face considerable challenges in making effective use of increasing amounts of information. In order to support product information retrieval and reuse, one approach is to use case-based reasoning (CBR) in which problems are solved “by using or adapting solutions to old problems.” In CBR, a case includes both a representation of the problem and a solution to that problem. Case-based reasoning uses similarity measures to identify cases which are more relevant to the problem to be solved. However, most non-numeric similarity measures are based on syntactic grounds, which often fail to produce good matches when confronted with the meaning associated to the words they compare. To overcome this limitation, ontologies can be used to produce similarity measures that are based on semantics. This paper presents an ontology-based approach that can determine the similarity between two classes using feature-based similarity measures that replace features with attributes. The proposed approach is evaluated against other existing similarities. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated with a case study on product–service–system design problems.     

影响单丝牌号5000S产品质量的因素分析

单丝牌号5000S是大庆HDPE装置的主要产品,适用于加工渔网丝、编织袋等产品。作者们讨论了产品的物性参数特点,分析了以往产品质量存在的主要问题。从工艺技术方面对于如何提高5000S产品的优级品率,提高产品的加工性能和使用性能进行了讨论。