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Modern day manufacturing has seen the replacement of manual transfer of parts between press machines with automatic transfer systems. Higher automation productivity demands greater flexibility of transfer devices. This paper deals with methods to improve the flexibility of fixtures designed to transfer parts between press machines.

Describes methods to improve the flexibility of fixtures designed to transfer parts between press machines in Press Shop 3 at Iran Khodro Company (IKCO). A fuzzy C means clustering‐based method is developed to optimize the number and arrangement of actuators for each fixture. Economical aspects of this novel design are addressed as well.

The simulation results suggest that application of a flexible fixtures system and use of linear motors was the best method of adding flexibility to the loader‐unloader system.

Provides evidence that flexible components are indispensable to increasing production speed and reliability in an automated system.

The purpose of this paper is to design and implement a landmine detection robot (Venus) equipped with three electromagnetic sensors and controlled by ordered weighted averaging (OWA) sensor fusion approach. Higher numbers of detected mines in a fixed time interval and lower total power consumption are the achieved goals of this research.

OWA sensor fusion is exploited for data combination in this paper. Unlike most other landmine detection robots, Venus has three electromagnetic sensors, the positions of which can be adjusted according to the environmental conditions. Also, a novel approach for OWA weight dedication using Gaussian distribution function is applied and the whole idea is evaluated practically in several randomly mined fields. Finally, for better evaluation, performance of Venus is compared with the other two landmine detection robots.

The simulation and experimental results proved that in a predetermined interval of time, not only total energy consumption is reduced, but also by expanding the surface and the depth of influence of electromagnetic waves, the number of detected mines is considerably raised.

In contrast to the regular demining process, which is relatively expensive and complicated, the landmine detection method proposed in this research is surprisingly simple, cost effective, and efficient. Therefore, it may be attractive for every company or organization in this field of research.

The paper describes research which implements and evaluates a novel control approach based on OWA sensor fusion method, a new way of using Gaussian distribution function for determining OWA weights, and also an adaptive physical configuration for sensors based on environmental conditions.

This work aims to determine the best linear model using an artificial neural network (ANN) with the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA-ANN) and ANN to predict the energy consumption for land leveling.

Using ANN, integrating artificial neural network and imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA-ANN) and sensitivity analysis (SA) can lead to a noticeable improvement in the environment. In this research, effects of various soil properties such as embankment volume, soil compressibility factor, specific gravity, moisture content, slope, sand per cent and soil swelling index on energy consumption were investigated.

According to the results, 10-8-3-1, 10-8-2-5-1, 10-5-8-10-1 and 10-6-4-1 multilayer perceptron network structures were chosen as the best arrangements and were trained using the Levenberg–Marquardt method as the network training function. Sensitivity analysis revealed that only three variables, namely, density, soil compressibility factor and cut-fill volume (V), had the highest sensitivity on the output parameters, including labor energy, fuel energy, total machinery cost and total machinery energy. Based on the results, ICA-ANN had a better performance in the prediction of output parameters in comparison with conventional methods such as ANN or particle swarm optimization (PSO)-ANN. Statistical factors of root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (R²) illustrate the superiority of ICA-ANN over other methods by values of about 0.02 and 0.99, respectively.

A limited number of research studies related to energy consumption in land leveling have been done on energy as a function of volume of excavation and embankment. However, in this research, energy and cost of land leveling are shown to be functions of all the properties of the land, including the slope, coefficient of swelling, density of the soil, soil moisture and special weight dirt. Therefore, the authors believe that this paper contains new and significant information adequate for justifying publication in an international journal.

The purpose of this paper is to develop three methods including artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC-ANN), regression and adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to predict the environmental indicators for land leveling and to analysis the sensitivity of these parameters.

This paper develops three methods including artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC-ANN), regression and adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to predict the environmental indicators for land leveling and to analysis the sensitivity of these parameters. So, several soil properties such as soil, cut/fill volume, soil compressibility factor, specific gravity, moisture content, slope, sand per cent and soil swelling index in energy consumption were investigated. A total of 90 samples were collected from three land areas with the selected grid size of (20 m × 20 m). Acquired data were used to develop accurate models for labor, energy (LE), fuel energy (FE), total machinery cost (TMC) and total machinery energy (TM).

By applying the three mentioned analyzing methods, the results of regression showed that, only three parameters of sand per cent, slope and soil, cut/fill volume had significant effects on energy consumption. All developed models (Regression, ANFIS and ABC-ANN) had satisfactory performance in predicting aforementioned parameters in various field conditions. The adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) has the most capability in prediction according to least RMSE and the highest R² value of 0.0143, 0.9990 for LE. The ABC-ANN has the most capability in prediction of the environmental and energy parameters with the least RMSE and the highest R² with the related values for TMC, FE and TME (0.0248, 0.9972), (0.0322, 0.9987) and (0.0161, 0.9994), respectively.

As land leveling with machines requires considerable amount of energy, optimizing energy consumption in land leveling operation is of a great importance. So, three approaches comprising: ABC-ANN, ANFIS as powerful and intensive methods and regression as a fast and simplex model have been tested and surveyed to predict the environmental indicators for land leveling and determine the best method. Hitherto, only a limited number of studies associated with energy consumption in land leveling have been done. In mentioned studies, energy was a function of the volume of excavation (cut/fill volume). Therefore, in this research, energy and cost of land leveling are functions of all the properties of the land including slope, coefficient of swelling, density of the soil, soil moisture, special weight and swelling index which will be thoroughly mentioned and discussed. In fact, predicting minimum cost of land leveling for field irrigation according to the field properties is the main goal of this research which is in direct relation with environment and weather pollution.