Engineering Commons^™

Assessing Readiness For Implementation Of Prognostics And Health Management In Small And Medium Enterprises, Sara C. Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) refers to using robust sensing, monitoring, and control to detect, assess, and track system health degradation and failure modes, allowing for enhanced management and operational decisions. The need for PHM within a manufacturing facility has increased due to a variety of reasons, such as the increasing complexity of manufacturing equipment.

A lack of readiness for digital implementations is linked to failure. The literature highlights certain barriers and enablers that can signal whether a technology implementation will be successful, such as management and maintenance employees’ desire to change the existing process, an understanding and willingness to …

Accelerating Transition To Production By Manufacturing Readiness Focus During Development, William K. Duncan

Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Defense has adopted management tools, such as Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRLs), which seek to address issues that have delayed the transition to production and delivery of deployment-ready systems. The MRL scale and assessment process institutes periodic reviews of products during the acquisition process. Specifically, MRLs provide a scale to measure, and importantly communicate, progress by evaluating and summarizing multiple aspects of product maturity. Unfortunately, issues are often identified during the periodic assessments which, if addressed earlier, would have further streamlined product delivery. The current research applies Model Based System Engineering tools to analyze and refine organizational structures …

A Dual Perspective Towards Building Resilience In Manufacturing Organizations, Steven A. Fazio

Theses and Dissertations

Modern manufacturing organizations exist in the most complex and competitive environment the world has ever known. This environment consists of demanding customers, enabling, but resource intensive Industry 4.0 technology, dynamic regulations, geopolitical perturbations, and innovative, ever-expanding global competition. Successful manufacturing organizations must excel in this environment while facing emergent disruptions generated as biproducts of complex man-made and natural systems. The research presented in this thesis provides a novel two-sided approach to the creation of resilience in the modern manufacturing organization. First, the systems engineering method is demonstrated as the qualitative framework for building literature-derived organizational resilience factors into organizational structures …

Size And Cost Reduction Of The Antenna 3000, Mario Mignott, Austin Deaver, Josh Madaris

Senior Design Project For Engineers

For our senior design project, we have partnered with Compass Technology Group to improve its Antenna 3000 manufacturing process. The Antenna we are working on is not actually called this, but due to NDA regulations, we will disguise it as the Antenna 3000. This will include finding a way to minimize material costs and labor hours involved to assemble this product together. Our minimum success criteria will be to reduce both the manufacturing time and materials' cost by 20%. Our primary approach to solving this problem will be to implement Lean Six Sigma practices such as the DMAIC principle.

Using …

Theory And Practice Of Supply Chain Synchronization, Michael Prokle

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, we develop strategies to synchronize component procurement in assemble-to-order (ATO) production and overhaul operations. We focus on the high-tech and mass customization industries which are not only considered to be very important to create or keep U.S. manufacturing jobs, but also suffer most from component inventory burden. In the second chapter, we address the deterministic joint replenishment inventory problem with batch size constraints (JRPB). We characterize system regeneration points, derive a closed-form expression of the average product inventory, and formulate the problem of finding the optimal joint reorder interval to minimize inventory and ordering costs per unit …

Best Matching Processes In Distributed Systems, Mohsen Moghaddam

Open Access Dissertations

The growing complexity and dynamic behavior of modern manufacturing and service industries along with competitive and globalized markets have gradually transformed traditional centralized systems into distributed networks of e- (electronic) Systems. Emerging examples include e-Factories, virtual enterprises, smart farms, automated warehouses, and intelligent transportation systems. These (and similar) distributed systems, regardless of context and application, have a property in common: They all involve certain types of interactions (collaborative, competitive, or both) among their distributed individuals—from clusters of passive sensors and machines to complex networks of computers, intelligent robots, humans, and enterprises. Having this common property, such systems may encounter common …

Process Optimization Of Boatmate Trailers, Llc, Jamie M. Smotherman, Jasmine L. Kelley

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Design For Manufacturing Of Sports Equipment, Cedrick Bit, Christopher L. Head

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The purpose of this project was to validate industrial designs for a product in its conceptual stage and suggest/implement design changes that suit the contracting company’s needs while assuring the product maintains its basic functional requirements. Techniques and methods used to validate the design include 3‐D solid modeling, physical product application using rapid prototyping to produce the product. Methods of design for manufacturing were analyzed in the design. Processes used in the validation and verification of the design include solid modeling design, methods of measurements, fixture design and manufacturing processes. Full design specifications and solid model files were finalized and …

Development Of A Method For Determining The Relative Manufacturing Complexity Of Advanced Engineering Materials, Shardul Y. Pandya

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The immediate adaptation of newly developed materials--with unique and highly desirable properties--is hampered by several factors, including: (1) high material cost and limited availability, (2) lack of information on them, including prior experience in their design and manufacture, immature manufacturing processes and general uncertainty in their behavior patterns, (3) unique handling issues, such as excessive manual labor, high process temperatures, toxicity, disposal problems, limited working lives, and low damage tolerance

Therefore, in spite of their significant benefits, potential users tend to shy away from the widespread use of new materials, instead preferring conventional and tested materials forms.

This dissertation is …