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19th International Conference in Manufacturing Research ICMR 2022 Manufacturing is a knowledge-intensive business in which companies are distinguished for their ability to deliver products and services using numerous forms of information and knowledge. Various information and communication technologies and systems have been created throughout the years to effectively manage information and knowledge in industry. However, capturing knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge, remains a challenge. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies for industrial tasks have been developed by the research and practitioner communities. For example, in manufacturing, VR/AR have been used to aid in different machining and assembly tasks. This paper presents a proposed an AR equipment ‘Head Mounted Device (HMD)’ under development, as a tool for capturing manufacturing expertise’s knowledge. The technology intends to capture tacit knowledge using a 3D camera installed on the operator's HMD. The proposed approach also supplies the operator with information on production and ongoing processes. The EU Interreg V France Channel England Programme provided funding for this research (CoRoT, Ref: 99).

Co-design and co-creation of robotic systems and supporting automated solutions for industrial applications have seen a rapid increase in development efforts in recent years. Research and development activities within collaborative and industrial robotic projects alongside implementations of technical solutions have also shown significant gains in offering small, medium and some large enterprises enough cost benefit justification and improved understanding of technical requirements to adopt them in the ‘servitisation’ of manufacturing and assembly operations. This paper reports findings related to the impact of generating and exchanging technical knowledge within a large multimillion euros project in France-England Channel region over a running duration of over 5 years and the mutual benefits it had on the research institutes, industrial partners and collaborative network established from the project. The results indicated an increase in knowledge acquisition and exchange amongst individuals that can be used to gain significant advantages and a steppingstone in improving new product development activities, speed to market, as well as enhancing methods to establish long term collaborative efforts within industry-academia and improve innovation output.

The CoRoT project is a collaboration of French and UK partners funded by the EU Interreg Programme. The CoRoT research group has developed a mobile robot demonstrating autonomous operations particularly aiming for applications within flexible manufacturing factories of small to medium enterprises (SMEs). The robot’s capability of full separation classifies it as a modular robotic system. Although the separation is possible, it introduces challenges in the areas of staff training, physical labour and workshop planning. This paper introduces a new method resolving the overt issues of lifting the robot, storing the robot and making use of the two systems as well as highlighting emergency stop regulations and maintaining the warranty of the equipment. By using a steel framed pneumatic lift, the top module can be removed and held in place, anchoring the arm for full operations whilst freeing the base to perform delivery tasks enabling seamless separation of modular robotic systems.

As a concept, Industry 4.0 encompasses the total transformation of the ‘traditional’ production environment with the real-time networking of products, processes and infrastructure via the Internet. What is not clear however, is the functional relationship between pre-existing operational practices such as Lean Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, and thus the associated organisational qualities of ‘Lean-ness’ and ‘Smart-ness’ respectively. This work then presents a formulaic approach to the ubiquitous Lean Manufacturing Value Stream Map process, in order to incorporate Digital elements into traditional product value streams. The result is the creation of a Digital Value Stream Map, which may be utilised to rationalise and deploy Industry 4.0 improvement projects.

Defects generated by the UK supply chain is much higher than its global competitors. Defects impact costs and production throughput due to unpredictable disruptions resulting in many non-value adding activities. However, defects data associated knowledge have rarely been considered and implemented as the manufacturing capability in existing design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) data/knowledge bases. On the other hand, current ICT systems used in the aerospace industry are not flexible enough to keep up with the new requirements of collaborating to manage knowledge properly, and the use of real-time manufacturing data generated in manufacturing activities. This research was carried out in collaboration with one of the UK’s largest aerospace companies in order to analyse the complexity of design and manufacturing activities of high-value safety-critical aerospace products. The results of the work are presented, and a novel approach and system was developed, that can be used to support DFMA using defects knowledge. The approach was implemented as a knowledge management system using collaborative design principles. Key findings from the main contribution in the context of extended enterprises of high value low volume safety critical product manufacturing are discussed.

Using a combination of active Radio-Frequency Identification tracking and staff interviews with members from an aerospace manufacturing company, it was uncovered that over 80 hours per week was spent in the manual movement of goods between departments. On a site of over 1000 employees that uses dedicated build cells in separated departments, this mixed-use facility proves challenging for the adoption of an autonomous delivery system due to its narrow corridors and high occupancy, however by investigating the concerns of employees and suggesting low-cost retroactive solutions, this project seeks to justify the transition from manual to automated onsite logistics. The conclusion found that indeed the company does have the transport yields to justify the use of Autonomous Mobile Robots, that the robots would supplement rather than replace workers and that safety was a key factor to address when using robots on a site of this configuration.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors. The Aerospace Industry has been undertaking strategic changes towards digital manufacturing. One of the challenges is the lack of rationalisation for a cost-benefit analysis of automating certain manufacturing and assembly processes within a customer order. The rigidness and complexity of aerospace lifecycle, and tight industry restrictions does not leave much room for high risk innovations in manufacturing and production lines. This research addressed this problem by investigating an automation adoption scenario with BAE Systems, Electronic Systems, which is a UK based aeronautical systems integrator. This paper reports findings from the general manufacturing industry via an industrial survey. These findings are compared with original findings from an empirical study carried out with BAE Systems within the New Product Introduction team to automate product transportation logistics in an environmental test facility. The paper describes the challenges particularly related to skills, and labour workforce required to manipulate heavy standing products in and out of a production line and how their requirements can be addressed within an automation solution package. The solution includes key design factors related to intricate handling of aeronautic systems via the gripping interface design, and the rest of the operational issues surrounding the testing objectives such as transportation, and test setup. The findings are presented in the form of a requirements analysis for businesses looking to automate manually-intensive tasks in the future, and provide some insights into the lessons learnt in the development of the solution to benefit UK manufacturing tactics to some similar challenges. European Commission (improving the design of flexible and responsive manufacturing systems involving autonomous and Collaborative Robots (CoRoT, Project No: 99)), in collaboration with and co-sponsored by BAE Systems.

Introduction Although communal smoking of hookah by means of water pipes is perceived to be a safe alternative to cigarette smoking, the effects of hookah smoke in respiratory epithelia have not been well characterized. This study evaluated epigenomic and transcriptomic effects of hookah smoke relative to cigarette smoke in human respiratory epithelial cells. Methods Primary normal human small airway epithelial cells from three donors and cdk4 and hTERT-immortalized small airway epithelial cells and human bronchial epithelial cells were cultured for 5 days in normal media with or without cigarette smoke condensates (CSCs) or water pipe condensates (WPCs). Cell count, immunoblot, RNA sequencing, quantitative real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction, and quantitative chromatin immunoprecipitation techniques were used to compare effects of hookah and cigarette smoke on cell proliferation, global histone marks, gene expression, and promoter-related chromatin structure. Results CSC and WPC decreased global H4K16ac and H4K20me3 histone marks and mediated distinct and overlapping cancer-associated transcriptome signatures and pathway modulations that were cell line dependent and stratified across lung cancer cells in a histology-specific manner. Epiregulin encoding a master regulator of EGFR signaling that is overexpressed in lung cancers was up-regulated, whereas FILIP1L and ABI3BP encoding mediators of senescence that are repressed in lung cancers were down-regulated by CSC and WPC. Induction of epiregulin and repression of FILIP1L and ABI3BP by these condensates coincided with unique epigenetic alterations within the respective promoters. Conclusions These findings support translational studies to ascertain if hookah-mediated epigenomic and transcriptomic alterations in cultured respiratory epithelia are detectable and clinically relevant in hookah smokers.

Fibre reinforced filament fabrication is a potential additive manufacturing method for certain load-bearing parts in aerospace and automotive products. In current practice, printing paths are planned from part geometry without considering loading conditions. This paper presents a new method for optimizing printing paths to align with the principal stress field of parts in use. Because of the powerful processing capabilities, for the first time grayscale image was adopted to represent the irregular vector field, which can be robustly processed into sub-regions for generating regular printing paths. Preliminary bending test achieved promising increase in tensile strength compared with conventional methods.

Accurate, rapid and automated tool wear inspection is critical to manufacturing quality, cost and efficiency in smart manufacturing systems. However, manual inspection of tool wear is still a common industrial practice which is inefficient, prone to human errors and not suitable for digitized manufacturing. Previously reported automatic tool wear inspection methods were inaccurate because they only used the remaining worn boundary (i.e., the partial-absence original tool boundary) to approximate tool wear. The authors discovered the association principle between the change law of the cutting edge grayscale and the relative position of the original and worn boundary, which was used to establish the probability functions to accurately reconstruct the curved original tool boundary via Bayesian Inference. The experiment results reported in this paper proved higher efficiency and accuracy than previous automatic tool wear inspection methods.

The 5G network takes advantage of the small cells\ud technology. The next logical step is to cover the urban landscape\ud with mobile small cells, to optimize network services. However,\ud the introduction of mobile small cells raises various security\ud challenges. Cryptographic solutions are capable of solving these\ud as long as they are supported by appropriate key management\ud schemes. The threshold-tolerant identity-based cryptosystem\ud forms a solid basis for key management schemes for mobile small\ud cells. However, this approach is unable to sustain security over\ud time. Therefore, we introduce two extensions, proactive secret\ud sharing and private key cloaking, to address this challenge.

Monitoring and predicting tool wear is an important issue in dynamic process control under changing conditions, especially for machining large-sized difficult-to-cut materials used in airplanes. Existing tool wear monitoring and prediction methods are mainly based on given cutting conditions over a period of time. This paper presents a novel method for accurately predicting tool wear under varying cutting conditions based on a proposed new meta-learning model which can be easily trained, updated and adapted to new machining tasks of different cutting conditions. Experiments proved a substantial improvement in the accuracy of predicting tool wear compared with existing deep learning methods.

Deformation prediction is the basis of deformation control in manufacturing process planning. This paper presents an on-line part deformation prediction method using a deep learning model during numerical control machining process, which is different from traditional methods based on finite element simulation of stress release prior to the actual machining process. A fourth-order tensor model is proposed to represent the continuous part geometric information, process information, and monitoring information, which is used as the input to the deep learning model. A deep learning framework with a conventional neural network and a recurrent neural network has been constructed and trained by monitored deformation data and process information associated with interim part geometric information. The proposed method can be generalised for different parts with certain similarities and has the potential to provide a reference for an adaptive machining control strategy for reducing part deformation. The proposed method was validated by actual machining experiments, and the results show that the prediction accuracy has been improved compared with existing methods. Furthermore, this paper shifts the difficult problem of residual stress measurement and off-line deformation prediction to the solution of on-line deformation prediction based on deformation monitoring data.

This paper reports the research on the complex process of implementing modular product structures in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system. There are many challenges in implementing the system. One main challenge is organising or mapping existing product data and migrating it to the new PLM system. Companies often use a PLM tool for management of CAD files, documents and drawings, but they do not take advantage of the full potential of the PLM system to support the development activities of modular products. Product data management tools are used mainly for product CAD data management and PLM systems support by automating and managing some of the operational complexity of modular product design. The aim of this research is to propose a data model that can be used for implementing modular product structures in a PLM system and a tool that can formalise the existing data so as to migrate it into the PLM system.

Microwave curing technologies have many advantages in manufacturing fiber reinforced polymer composite materials used in aerospace products, compared with traditional autoclave curing technologies. However, the uneven electromagnetic field of microwave in the cavity of the curing chamber results in uneven temperature on the surface of composite laminates during curing, which has been a major obstacle in industrial applications worldwide. Existing methods attempted to solve the problem by the random superposition of uneven electromagnetic fields, but the results were still not satisfactory to meet the high quality requirements of aerospace parts. This paper reveals the one-to-one correspondence between heating patterns of composite parts and microwave curing system settings, and reports a new concept to solve this problem by continuously monitoring and compensating the uneven temperature distribution in real-time. Experimental results from both fiber optical fluorescence sensors and infrared thermal imagers showed significant improvement in temperature uniformity compared with existing methods.

There had been research efforts in the knowledge management and related disciplines devoted to integrating data and knowledge generated from manufacturing activities into the design process. Such efforts focused on approaches for enhancing engineering specifications and supplier related decision making in order to improve manufacturing quality through reducing defects. However, rarely did previous researchers address the ‘Integration’ aspect as part of a centrally-driven systematic workflow that enables collaborative knowledge capture between the internal design teams and manufacturing engineering teams firstly, and also with dispersed supplier teams. The industrial context of this research is discussed in this paper reflecting on the nature of the aerospace industry, which involves heavy reliance on information exchange to optimise designs on a day-to-day basis. This aspect had already been identified by many researchers to be under-addressed and a very significant challenge of collaborative design. The main aim of describing the context is to address the complexity involved in integrating manufacturing data generated internally first, and from suppliers second, within workflow context in order to to design a collaborative framework using knowledge management principles. The complexity also features aspects of product design and manufacturing specifically related to the the aerospace industry which tend to have exceptional functional specifications than other products from other industries. The implications of the proposed approach in the light of high value, low volume and high product lifecycle management challenges is also discussed. This paper also reports findings of an empirical investigation carried out with a leading UK based manufacturer of avionic systems with regards to manufacturing knowledge integration challenges related to improving the design of complex avionic systems, in order to enhance the design process for the business and improve the adaptation of a generic product design knowledge base. The purpose of it is to enable more rich data towards information driven design to improve manufacturing quality through defect reduction strategies and techniques.

In advanced manufacturing systems, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine tools are important equipment to manufacture product components of high precision, whilst from equipment maintenance point of view, they are regarded as the ‘products’ provided by machine tool manufacturers. Therefore, the reliability of CNC machine tools affects not only the quality of the components they manufacture, but also the reputation and profits of equipment suppliers. This paper presents a novel knowledge-based maintenance planning system to facilitate information and knowledge sharing between all stakeholders including machine tool manufacturers, users (manufacturing systems), maintenance service providers and part suppliers (for machine tools), in the emerging ‘Product-Service’ business model. Case Based Reasoning principles have been implemented to improve the efficiency of maintenance planning. Ontologies were adopted to represent field knowledge using adaptation guided retrievals based on semantic similarity and correlation. The adaption algorithm has been developed based on the Casual Theory and the dependence relationship to generate the solution for required maintenance problems. The proposed system was implemented using Content Management technologies, which proved to have advantages over traditional database systems in managing engineering knowledge, and has been verified using an example CNC machine tool. The results were commented by industrial collaborators as very promising and further exploitation in industry was recommended.

The increasing market needs and technologies evolution, push companies to develop competitive advantages based on adequate and intensive use of information technology and communication (ICT). However, SMEs do not realize the importance of ICT adoption, which becomes vital for the development, and are not always well equipped to adopt and integrate them to their activities. \ud \ud The paper focused on issues regarding the ICT adoption, especially PLM solutions by SMEs. By analyzing the PLM definitions and works done, we explored indicators that impact positively or negatively ICT and PLM adoption. This paper proposes a model, currently theoretical, with empirical validation proposal through a survey.

The aim of adopting product lifecycle management in a highly product centric knowledge environment is to reduce product development time and costs whilst improving quality through integrating people, processes, resources and information effectively. In the aerospace industry, most products and systems are manufactured, delivered to customers and serviced over an extensively long time, typically 20 years or more. This results in the build-up of large amounts of dispersed data and information related to defects throughout the different product's lifecycle stages, hence inhibiting the ability to make effective use of defect data to improve design for manufacturing (DFM) implementation. There have been very limited research efforts aiming to overcome these challenges in the low volume high value aerospace manufacturing context. This paper presents the findings of an extensive industrial investigation carried out at BAE systems (Rochester, UK) to identify the gaps and requirements in the industrial practice and proposes the need for a structured approach to defect data management in order to establish the systematic link between the defects, engineering data, and related issues within PLM system context.

In an increasingly competitive globalised manufacturing environment, the necessity to develop new products and introduce innovative enhancements to existing ranges has created a critical need for the increased utilisation and sharing of organisational and employee knowledge. The capture of this knowledge within industry is of paramount importance as organisations seek to survive and remain competitive. Crowdsourcing, as a collaborative idea generation and problem solving activity, allows employees to capture explicit knowledge from large groups of colleagues and teams, and offers the potential to extract previously unknown tacit knowledge in a less formal virtual environment. This paper provides a review of recently published literature relating to crowdsourcing in the manufacturing industry and offers suggestions for the future direction of crowdsourcing research in manufacturing and product development.

This paper presents a new concept of feature for freeform surface machining that defines the changes in feature status during real manufacturing situations which have not been sufficiently addressed by current international standards and previous research in feature technology. These changes are multi-perspective, including (i) changes in depth-of-cut: the geometry of a feature in the depth-of-cut direction changes during different machining operations such as roughing, semi-finishing and finishing; (ii) changes across the surface: a surface may be divided into different machining regions (effectively sub-features) for the selection of appropriate manufacturing methods for each region such as different cutting tools, parameters, set-ups or machine tools; and (iii) changes in resources or manufacturing capabilities may require the re-planning of depth-of-cuts, division of machining regions and manufacturing operations (machines, tools, set-ups and parameters). Adding the above dynamic information to the part information models in current CAD systems (which only represent the final state of parts) would significantly improve the accuracy, efficiency and timeliness of manufacturing planning and optimisation, especially for the integrated NC machining planning for complex freeform surfaces. A case study in an aircraft manufacturing company will be included in this paper.

Product development process deals with large amount of information generated from market survey, concept design, manufacture, test, limited production, production, service, and obsoleting. The information should be stored systematically so that it is easily traceable and reusable for future product development. This paper presents a methodology for seamless product information flow between the three main enterprise information systems such as Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) used in the process of innovative product development while implementing PLM. PLM implementation deals with various existing product data and information generated over years both from CAD and ERP systems. Data integration is very challenging in multi-national engineering companies and has important impact on future decisions while creating new processes. The aim is to define a modular product structure that can be used to connect the product information throughout the life cycle that can be reused effectively and efficiently for future similar products.

Providing maintenance and services for high value complex products would extend manufacturers’ responsibilities and benefits to the products’ whole usable life, and provide the opportunities to re-use or re-manufacture some failed parts. Sophisticated Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine tools in modern manufacturing systems are special products in that they are also used to manufacture other products, and their operation performance directly affects the quality of the manufactured parts as well as the performance of the entire manufacturing system. To ensure CNC machine tools’ consistent performance, appropriate and efficient maintenance and services are essential and this is more challenging as technologies become more sophisticated and the environment is more dynamic. Previous research was mainly focused on maintenance strategy and maintenance scheduling. Very little effort was devoted to providing operational guidance for maintenance process execution, i.e., providing service suppliers with detailed information about resources needed for maintenance such as tooling, consumables, materials and spare parts, as well as service steps including disassembly and assembly of the serviced products. In this project, planning maintenance operation sequences, schedules and resource allocation are the three main tasks for generating final maintenance plans. This paper will present a Collaborative Maintenance Planning System (CoMPS) which will manage information and knowledge to support decision making in maintenance process planning.

Today, the manufacturing industry is under pressure to be able to rapidly come up with innovative designs and produce them in much shorter timeframes in order to keep up with growing customer demands and quickly gain new business. One of the ways used to achieve shorter time to markets for new product developments is by using design for manufacturing (DFM) methods to reduce time and energy going into resolving manufacturing based defects. It is also more vital in today’s manufacturing industry to make use of DFM methods much earlier in the product development lifecycle in order to prevent potentially known quality defects from happening and save on costs associated with late design changes. This requires enabling a more systemic feedback cycle of production data for the creation of DFM knowledge repositories as well as overcoming some wider knowledge sharing barriers across the organization. This investigation focuses on how the communications of manufacturing knowledge from production data is affected by factors within the overall organization. The investigation is one of the few that consider the influence of organizational factors on the communication of engineering knowledge as well as the related knowledge sharing barriers. The project is carried out empirically with a large UK based aerospace manufacturing company by gathering data primarily from observations and interviews. This paper presents the findings followed by discussions for improving DFM Knowledge Management in the aerospace industry.

The UK Government considers its Aerospace Industry a remarkable success story, enjoying a global market share of 17% in 2015. The capture, management and sharing of employee knowledge is seen as vital if the industry is to remain highly innovative and retain its pre-eminent position internationally. Aerospace manufacturers, such as BAE Systems, often have to re-engineer business processes routinely to ensure their survival. Knowledge sharing in the industry is seen as challenging due to the dispersed nature of its operations and multi-tier supply chains. This article, through a 5-year participant-observation study at the World’s second largest aerospace and defence organisation, BAE Systems, proposes a new paradigm for virtual knowledge sharing in dispersed aerospace product development based on emergent social software platforms such as Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The developed framework and methodologies are applied to the bespoke BAE Systems’ engineering lifecycle process to validate its effectiveness with results indicating that Enterprise 2.0 technologies offer a more openly innovative environment in which employees may share and interact with knowledge more effectively and easily across geographical and functional boundaries, compared with conventional engineering information systems.

This paper provides an overview of some of the issues in knowledge management related to the sharing of knowledge in new product development. Previous research and concepts reported by international researchers and examples of the research projects carried out by the authors will be introduced. The paper first provides an overview of the history and importance of innovation and challenges in manufacturing. Then, the importance of new product development in the sustainable success of manufacturing enterprises in the globalised business operations is discussed. The formalisation and modelling of product development processes will also be introduced. The concept and different definitions of knowledge management by previous researchers are then introduced, with further discussion on knowledge sharing. At this point, the authors’ research in knowledge sharing is also introduced. Finally, the trend of using social media and Enterprise 2 technologies in knowledge management and sharing is introduced using the recent research projects of the authors as examples.

The guest editors are delighted to present this special issue on Digital Enterprise Technologies in Manufacturing to international researchers and practioners in the manufacturing and related technology and service sectors. The special issue includes carefully selected papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology held on 29-31 of March 2016 in Nanjing, China. Authors were invited to re-write, extend and significantly improve their papers presented at DET2016.

Dynamic Knowledge Management (KM) is a combination of cultural and technological factors, including the cultural factors of people and their motivations, technological factors of content and infrastructure and, where these both come together, interface factors. In this paper a Dynamic KM framework is described in the context of employees being motivated to create profit for their company through product development in high value manufacturing. It is reported how the framework was discussed during a meeting of the collaborating company’s (BAE Systems) project stakeholders. Participants agreed the framework would have most benefit at the start of the product lifecycle before key decisions were made. The framework has been designed to support organisational learning and to reward employees that improve the position of the company in the market place.

A novel framework of a product service system for high value machine tools in modern digitized manufacturing systems.A prototype collaborative maintenance planning system implemented using an Open Source Content Management System rather than traditional engineering information systems.The research focused on real-life service driven product manufacturing and service operations involving different stakeholders.A machine tool is regarded as 'product' in a product service system, which also manufactures other products in a manufacturing system - both roles have been considered in this research.This research also focused on the modeling of business process, communication and knowledge especially dynamic and unstructured knowledge. Product manufacturers are extending their responsibilities in the whole life cycle by providing services to their customers. In recent years, product service system has become an important research topic to address the special requirements in the new service driven business model. High value machine tools in modern manufacturing factories are special products: they are regarded as 'products' from maintenance point of view, and they also manufacture other products. In the new business model, the quality and behavior of a machine tool not only affect the quality of the parts it manufactures, but also affect the profits of the machine tool's manufacturer. However, in the research area of product service systems and related computerized maintenance systems, there is a lack of investigation into the special nature, problems and requirements of high value machine tool maintenance, which are very important in modern digitized manufacturing systems. Therefore, this research investigated the various relationships between different stakeholders in the machine tools' lifecycle, focusing on knowledge management, communication and the decision-making processes. This research also explored the potential application of advanced content management systems, which are widely implemented in the financial, business and government organizations, in the manufacturing engineering domain which has been dominated by traditional engineering information systems. A prototype collaborative maintenance planning system is proposed, developed and evaluated using an example machine tool, which indicated that significant improvement could be achieved and the content management technology has a number of advantages over the traditional engineering information systems, such as computer aided engineering, product data and lifecycle management, and enterprise resource planning systems, in managing machine tool maintenance and service information including dynamic and unstructured knowledge.

For the fabrication of carbon fibre reinforced composites used in aerospace industry, microwave curing technologies are more effective than traditional thermal curing technologies. However, the manufacturer's recommended cure cycles used in traditional autoclave curing are directly adopted into current microwave curing technologies without thorough validation. Here, a new cyclic heating and cooling methodology for microwave curing process control of composite is proposed by analyzing mechanisms of heat conduction, stress generation and curing kinetics. The results of the experiment carried out show significant reductions in residual strain, warpage, total curing time and energy consumption, compared with both traditional thermal curing and current microwave curing technologies. The mechanical properties of samples cured by the new process are compared with the autoclave cured ones.

In today’s global marketplace, employee knowledge is seen as a crucial asset for organisations, which enables them to gain a sustainable competitive edge over competitors. Much of the knowledge generated during new product development and testing can be categorised as tacit, developed from employees’ personal experiences and perceptions during product development projects; this makes it more difficult to capture and document for future sharing and reuse. The advent of social media in the last decade has changed the way many employees and global organisations communicate and interact with one another, providing a medium for knowledge to be transferred across the World Wide Web in a less formal manner. This research explores whether storytelling and video sharing functionality, embedded into a corporate social media site, is capable of facilitating the capture and sharing of employee knowledge during the product development cycle, providing user feedback on the developed knowledge capture and sharing methodology. It also presents a knowledge framework that is directly driven by the knowledge user, providing both knowledge direction and content.

From product maintenance and service point of view, high-value sophisticated computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools in modern manufacturing factories play important roles: they are manufacturing equipment, and on the other hand, they are also products supplied by equipment manufacturers. There is a trend that manufacturers are extending their responsibilities to the products use phase to meet customers’ requirements for lifetime support and service. To ensure the effective performance and efficient maintenance of high-value machine tools, information and knowledge from their lifecycle should be collected and reused. However, in the research area of product service systems and related computerised maintenance systems, there is a lack of research work on how to integrate knowledge from different stakeholders into the maintenance and service planning process, which is important for modern digital manufacturing systems to reduce machine tools’ downtime and improve their working performance. This project proposed a collaborative maintenance planning framework to connect different stakeholders and integrate their knowledge into the maintenance and service process. The potential of advanced content management systems (CMSs), which are widely used non-engineering sectors such as finance, business, publishing and government organisations, has been explored and tested for applications in the manufacturing engineering domain. The research realised that CMSs have several advantages compared with traditional engineering information systems, especially in managing dynamic and unstructured knowledge. A prototype maintenance and service planning system has been developed and evaluated using a real CNC machine tool.

Manufacturing enterprises around the world have made significant efforts to provide high value added services in addition to their traditional product development and manufacturing business. A product service system (PSS) is presented in this paper which aims to better integrate product development with maintenance and service operations. This project focuses on the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services in the aerospace industry. A MRO service model is proposed for the development of the proposed PSS. An ontology-based knowledge representation model is developed for the reuse of knowledge unambiguously in MRO services. An initial attempt has been made to demonstrate the role of PSS in the aerospace industry as a decision support tool for MRO services. Product lifecycle management (PLM) environment and Web-based technologies have been developed to enable the methodology to provide services and support in the aerospace manufacturing and flight operations business.

The special issue includes carefully selected papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology (DET2016) which was held on 29-31 March, 2016 in Nanjing, China. Authors were invited to re-write, extend and significantly improve their papers presented at DET2016. The main aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for the exchange of leading edge scientific knowledge and industrial experiences, regarding the development, integration and applications of the various aspects of Digital Enterprise Technologies, in the global manufafturing of the knowledge economy era.

Change management is very important to the success of new product development. The earlier that change issues are addressed, the greater that product lifecycle costs can be saved. This paper presents a novel methodology that has been developed to help designers trace, analyse and evaluate engineering changes occurring in the product design phase. A modelling method is employed to enhance the traceability of potential design changes occurring between the functional and structural domains of design. Based on functional and physical models, a matrix is developed to analyse change propagations and help identify design conflicts arising from design changes. A knowledge based methodology has been developed to resolve design conflicts by reusing previous design change knowledge. A wind turbine for power generation from the collaborating company is used to evaluate the developed methodologies.

This paper describes a set of modelling guidelines for the improved reuse of manufacturing knowledge in decision support systems. The work draws on research into product and manufacturing knowledge models, and uses a case study based on a simplified jet engine combustion chamber casing to illustrate the proposed guidelines. The paper describes three principles of reuse, i.e., the separation of information from knowledge, the separation of product knowledge from manufacturing process knowledge, and the correct classification of manufacturing knowledge. Whilst the first two principles were found to be well established in the research literature, guidance on how to apply classification hierarchies for optimum reuse was found to be insufficient. The guidelines presented in this paper therefore provide improved guidance on how to classify manufacturing knowledge for optimum reuse.

This paper presents novel collaboration methods implemented using a centralized client/server product development integration architecture, and a decentralized peer-to-peer network for smaller and larger companies using open source solutions. The product development integration architecture has been developed for the integration of disparate technologies and software systems for the benefit of collaborative work teams in design and manufacturing. This will facilitate the communication of early design and product development within a distributed and collaborative environment. The novelty of this work is the introduction of an 'out-of-box' concept which provides a standard framework and deploys this utilizing a proprietary state-of-the-art product lifecycle management system (PLM). The term 'out-of-box' means to modify the product development and business processes to suit the technologies rather than vice versa. The key business benefits of adopting such an approach are a rapidly reconfigurable network and minimal requirements for software customization to avoid systems instability.

Product knowledge support needs are compared in two companies with different production volumes and product complexity. Knowledge support requirements identified include: function, performance data, requirements data, common parts, regulatory guidelines and layout data. A process based data driven knowledge reuse method is evaluated in light of the identified product knowledge needs. The evaluation takes place through developing a pilot case with each company. It is found that the method provides more benefit to the high complexity design domain, in which a significant amount of work takes place at the conceptual design stages, relying on a conceptual product representation. There is not such a clear value proposition in a design environment whose main challenge is layout design and the application of standard parts and features. The method supports the requirement for conceptual product representation but does not fully support a standard parts library.

The problems of collaborative engineering design and knowledge management at the conceptual stage in a network of dissimilar enterprises was investigated. This issue in\ud engineering design is a result of the supply chain and virtual enterprise (VE) oriented industry that demands faster time to market and accurate cost/manufacturing analysis from conception. The solution consisted of a de-centralised super-peer net architecture to establish and maintain communications between enterprises in a VE. In the solution outlined below, the enterprises are able to share knowledge in a common format and nomenclature via the building-block shareable super-ontology that can be tailored on a project by project basis, whilst maintaining the common nomenclature of the ‘super-ontology’ eliminating knowledge interpretation issues. The two-tier architecture layout of the solution glues together the peer-peer and super-ontologies to form a coherent system for both internal and virtual enterprise knowledge management and product development.

Part 5: Languages and Ontologies; International audience; In global engineering enterprises, information and knowledge sharing are critical factors that can determine a project’s success. This statement is widely acknowledged in published literature. However, according to some academics, tacit knowledge is derived from a person’s lifetime of experience, practice, perception and learning, which makes it hard to capture and document in order to be shared. This project investigates if social media tools can be used to improve and enable tacit knowledge sharing within a global engineering enterprise. This paper first provides a brief background of the subject area, followed by an explanation of the industrial investigation, from which the proposed knowledge framework to improve tacit knowledge sharing is presented. This project’s main focus is on the improvement of collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst product development engineers in order to improve the whole product development cycle.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems have gained growing acceptance for managing all information relating to products throughout their full lifecycle, from idea conceptualisation through operations to servicing and disposal. This paper, through an in-depth exploratory study into a leading power generation manufacturing organisation, presents current PLM issues experienced by manufacturing companies, exploring three separate topics: 1) PLM, 2) Knowledge Management and Lessons Learnt and 3) Product Servicing and Maintenance. Following a review of published literature, results of the investigation are presented, analysing the responses of 17 employees interviewed. With respect to Product Development, it was found that information traceability is time consuming and change management requests take too long to complete. Results relating to knowledge management indicate that the Company operates a ‘who you know’ culture, but do aim to capture lessons learned on the manufacturing shop floor and assembly lines. Therefore, a prototype design is proposed to integrate the capturing of lessons learnt within the existing PLM system.

Various research studies have concluded that most new design projects are actually re-design activities. This re-design may be for improvement or for reprovision of existing products. Most research efforts for providing computer tools for supporting conceptual or early design mainly concentrated on the design of new products. In practice manufacturing plans generated when an order was placed may quickly become out-dated as the manufacturing environment and constraints often change. It is therefore equally important to regenerate manufacturing plans and re-evaluate design every time a product is changed, re-designed or reordered. This project focuses on manufacturability analysis and provides re-design support for conceptual design of discrete single-piece mechanical parts with emphasis on machined processes. This limitation of implementing the prototype system for re-design activities is not a system design or methodology restriction. The condition has been imposed by the authors as a prelude to validating the system and its results. A novel hybrid approach using a combination of sequential flowchart logic and an expert system has been developed which uses a user-defined feature tree as the input for its analysis. The system allows the designer to estimate manufacturability according to criteria of time and cost, and also to explore different scenarios of parametric variation in the design. A case study has been presented to validate the system’s practicality and usefulness.