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Provides a link between the total quality philosophy and building design/factory layout. The basic principles of TQ are incorporated into the design of a 45,000sq.ft development (comprising offices of 15,000sq.ft and 30,000sq.ft of electronics assembly and test) through meeting the requirements, management by prevention, cost of quality and error‐ free work.

This paper aims to introduce a simple hand-eye calibration method that can be easily applied with different objective functions.

The hand-eye calibration is solved by using the closed form absolute orientation equations. Instead of processing all samples together, the proposed method goes through all minimal solution sets. Final result is chosen after evaluating the solution set for arbitrary objectives. In this stage, outliers can be excluded optionally if more accuracy is desired.

The proposed method is very flexible and gives more accurate and convenient results than the existing solutions. The mathematical error expression defined by the calibration equations may not be valid in practice, where especially systematic distortions are present. It is shown in the simulations that the solution which results the least mathematical error in systems may have incorrect, incompatible results in the presence of practical demands.

The performance of the calibration performed with the proposed method is compared with the reference methods in the literature. When the back-projection error is benchmarked, which corresponds to the point repeatability, the proposed approach is considered as the most successful method among all others. Due to its robustness, it is decided to make tooling-sensor calibrations by the recommended method, in the robotic non-destructive testing station in Ford-OTOSAN Kocaeli Plant Body Shop Department.

Arranging the well-known AX = XB calibration equation in quaternion representation as Q_A = Q_x × Q_B × Q_x reveals another common spatial rotation equation. In this way, absolute orientation solution satisfies the hand-eye calibration equations. The proposed solution is not presented in the literature as a standalone hand-eye calibration method, although some researchers drop a hint to the relative formulations.

LUBRICATION of automatic transmissions provides the oil marketers and additive suppliers with a major challenge in terms of fluid development to satisfy the diverse requirements of such units. Fluid development is further complicated by the large number of non‐automotive applications for which automatic transmission fluids (ATFs) are being used.

This paper seeks to apply a heuristic approach to solve the facility layout problem and the description of a new computer‐aided layout design system.

The system utilizes a new approach for computing the adjacency scores, stacking of departments, and reserving or changing the department's shapes and dimensions. The system algorithms are based on calculating the minimal distance between departments and modified departmental closeness rating.

The research addressed in this paper has resulted in developing FLASP (Facility LAyout Support Program) software. FLASP could reduce the number of iterations needed to reach the optimal solution of the layout problems by restricting the location for each department depending on the relationships between them.

The system is built on a set of algorithms that are concerned with stacking, calculating the shortest rectilinear distances between departments, adjacency matrix system, modifications capabilities, and plans main aisles surrounding each department.

The program gathers the importance of both the adjacency relationships and the distances between departments in a way that depends on the concept that the adjacency score should not be nullified just because the two departments are no longer strictly adjacent. It rather considers that the adjacency score fades away gradually with the increase of distance between the two departments which leads to a main difference in distance consideration.

The purpose of this study is to design a robotic inline measurement system for spot welding quality control to achieve process requirement without any operator during the manufacturing flow.

A robot manipulator carries a stereo-camera and an ultrasonic control probe. The center position of the spot welding point is determined by evaluating the results of the edge, gradient and symmetry approaches from the methods proposed up to now in the literature to increase reliability. The center position of the spot welding point, determined in the camera reference plane, is transferred to the robot base plane coordinates with the hand–eye calibration proposed in this manuscript. Weld quality is checked by the ultrasonic test probe located at the spot welding point.

While operators can only control welding quality, the developed station can also evaluate the quality based on geometric accuracy by processing the deviation of the position of the spot welding points. The proposed calibration method and the results of other methods in the literature are presented in this study by comparing it with synthetic data in simulations and in practical application.

The quality control is performed not only for the spot welding made with robots but also for the manual welds as well. Because of vision configuration, and reliability issues, maximum allowable offset by the correct spot position is limited to 20 mm to position the manipulator for testing. The installation and pretest works of the developed robotic welding quality control station are completed in the Body Shop Area of Ford Otosan factory in Kocaeli/Turkey. The results of the robotic control process are monitored by the quality assurance team. Integration of automation with the production line will be completed and an inline measurement will be done.

In this paper, a new hand–eye calibration method based on simple and closed-form analytical solutions has been presented. The objective function is defined as reducing the deviation in the point projection, rather than reducing the error in the calibration equation. To increase reliability, combining the results of existing centering algorithms for the detection of the strongly deformed spot welding spot center, although it is normally in a circular form, has been suggested.

The authors propose to estimate a varying coefficient panel data model with different smoothing variables and fixed effects using a two-step approach. The pilot step estimates the varying coefficients by a series method. We then use the pilot estimates to perform a one-step backfitting through local linear kernel smoothing, which is shown to be oracle efficient in the sense of being asymptotically equivalent to the estimate knowing the other components of the varying coefficients. In both steps, the authors remove the fixed effects through properly constructed weights. The authors obtain the asymptotic properties of both the pilot and efficient estimators. The Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed estimator performs well. The authors illustrate their applicability by estimating a varying coefficient production frontier using a panel data, without assuming distributions of the efficiency and error terms.

Three types of industrial buyer-seller relational process models are available: joining theory, stage theory, and state theory. However, historically, these models have developed based on the knowledge and cultural context of the Western world. Several researchers note that national culture may have an impact on international industrial buyer-seller relationships. Including culture in the models is highly important, especially as the business environment is increasingly more global and different countries have different business cultures. The goal of this paper is to define the most suitable industrial buyer-seller relational process models for describing relationships in various contexts. The paper includes a through literature review and a single case study in order to reach this objective. A new state theory model evolved during the research. It consists of two beginning states: searching and starting; four purely middles states: constant/static, decline, growth, and troubled; and a purely end state: termination. The state of dormant/inert is both a middle state and an end state, that is, when the relational actors are not in contact does not mean that the relationship has ended, but instead, for example, new legislation may have been implemented, which requires the actors to evaluate their relationship and its future. A relationship goes through the two beginning states in the order mentioned above, but after that, any state may occur.

The purpose of this paper is to present a stable and efficient numerical technique based on modified trigonometric cubic B-spline functions for solving the time-fractional diffusion equation (TFDE). The TFDE has numerous applications to model many real objects and processes.

The time-fractional derivative is used in the Caputo sense. A modification is made in trigonometric cubic B-spline (TCB) functions for handling the Dirichlet boundary conditions. The modified TCB functions have been used to discretize the space derivatives. The stability of the technique is also discussed.

The obtained results are compared with those reported earlier showing that the present technique gives highly accurate results. The stability analysis shows that the method is unconditionally stable. Furthermore, this technique is efficient and requires less storage.

The current work is novel for solving TFDE. This technique is unconditionally stable and gives better results than existing results (Ford et al., 2011; Sayevand et al., 2016; Ghanbari and Atangana, 2020).