Search

In the highly competitive field of material manufacturing, stakeholders strive for the increased quality of the end products, reduced cost of operation, and the timely completion of their business processes. Digital twin (DT) technologies are considered major enablers that can be deployed to assist the development and effective provision of manufacturing processes. Additionally, knowledge graphs (KG) have emerged as efficient tools in the industrial domain and are able to efficiently represent data from various disciplines in a structured manner while also supporting advanced analytics. This paper proposes a solution that integrates a KG and DTs. Through this synergy, we aimed to develop highly autonomous and flexible DTs that utilize the semantic knowledge stored in the KG to better support advanced functionalities. The developed KG stores information about materials and their properties and details about the processes in which they are involved, following a flexible schema that is not domain specific. The DT comprises smaller Virtual Objects (VOs), each one acting as an abstraction of a single step of the Industrial Business Process (IBP), providing the necessary functionalities that simulate the corresponding real-world process. By executing appropriate queries to the KG, the DT can orchestrate the operation of the VOs and their physical counterparts and configure their parameters accordingly, in this way increasing its self-awareness. In this article, the architecture of such a solution is presented and its application in a real laser glass bending process is showcased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this quasi-field experiment was to test whether an office ergonomics training program reduces employees' psychological stress and improves their environmental control, environmental satisfaction, and communication levels. A conceptual model was developed and used to test these relationships. Preintervention and postintervention survey data were collected from 89 knowledge workers. The office ergonomics training program significantly improved workers' self-reported perceptions of environmental control, satisfaction with the work environment, and the degree to which the environment supported communication with coworkers. However, psychological stress was unchanged. Environmental control was found to mediate the relationship between preenvironmental and postenvironmental satisfaction. Overall, the results confirm the importance of incorporating ergonomics training into office workplaces to enhance the effective use of work environments and of knowledge workers sense of control and environmental satisfaction. Keywords: environmental control; environmental satisfaction; communication; psychological stress; office ergonomics training

This paper explores the location choice of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in China, shedding special light on the role of agglomeration of same-nationality firms. We examine how this role differs according to firms' productivity. Furthermore, we compare the location choice of Japanese and Taiwanese MNEs in China, taking into consideration that Taiwanese MNEs experience less uncertainty in investing in China due to Taiwan's linguistic and cultural advantages. When considering firms' productivity, we find that less productive Japanese firms prefer to locate close to larger same-nationality agglomerations while there are no differences in location choices in the case of Taiwanese firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]