Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science

Trust is essential in the digital world. It is a critical task to build digital trust for the ongoing digital engineering transformation. Aiming at developing a blockchain-based digital trust mechanism for Cloud Manufacturing or Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS), in this paper, we use the manufacturing of low dead space (LDS) medical syringes through Cloud Manufacturing as a motivating scenario to develop a basic framework. To meet the need of optimally saving COVID-19 vaccine doses to save more lives, the medical device manufacturing community needs to make a swift move to meet the surged need for LDS syringes. Cloud Manufacturing is a form of emerging Digital Manufacturing facilitated with Cloud/Edge Computing, the Internet of Things, and other digital technologies. Cloud manufacturing allows quickly establishing a digital virtual enterprise that pools together various manufacturing resources worldwide to meet the surged needs of products and save cost and time. Trusting the product quality and safety is a significant challenge when using Cloud Manufacturing to manufacture the products. This paper proposes a schema of blockchain-based digital trust mechanisms with examples of using Cloud Manufacturing of medical LDS syringes for the urgent needs of catering COVID-19 vaccination.

This paper describes our course design approach that successfully transformed an undergraduate Robotics Technology course from in-person teaching to online guided by the TASKS model. Our course redesign process includes identifying conflicts, generating solutions, self-evaluation, and analyses of design solutions. We carefully balanced between Workload and students’ Affect, by designing comparable workloads as before, as well as maintaining students’ motivation similarly at the in-person level. Transforming this course consisting of lecture sessions and lab sessions with hardware and software elements yielded a set of course activities and teaching practices applicable to online teaching of other courses. When physical robots become unavailable, simulation projects were designed as alternatives and simulated versions of those physical projects used in face-to-face classroom. These simulation projects are in the areas of autonomous mobile robots, robotic manipulator, and advanced robotic control on MATLAB-ROS, respectively. Comparisons with past in-person results confirm that effective learning has been achieved remotely, having maintained student’s performance and motivation.

The need for flexible production has turned manufacturing’s attention to integrate fast and uncomplicated solutions. Collaborative robots (cobots) have been considered the most impactful technology due to their versatility and human-robot interaction feature. Its implementation requires expertise in both process and cobot programming. Consequently, demand for effective programming training has increased over the past years. This paper, then, aims to design and explore a smart cobot programming system and conduct an empirical study to understand human engagement and programming performance. A repertory grid is employed based on cobot experts to understand different cobot programming approaches. Meaningful insights were considered to design and implement a smart programming system configuration. Then, an empirical programming study was performed considering cobot expertise and human engagement. Results demonstrated similarities and disparities in data collected, which was inferred to indicate differences in cobot programming behavior. Finally, the work identifies and discusses patterns to differentiate programmer expertise levels and behaviors.

Reliability allocation is a very important problem during early design and development phases of a system. There are several reliability allocation techniques which are used to achieve the target reliability. The feasibility of objectives (FOO) technique is one of them that is widely used to perform system reliability allocation. But this technique has two fundamental shortcomings. The first is the measurement scale and the second is that it does not consider the order weight of the reliability allocation factors. The prioritization of the factors is also an important topic in decision making. Practically, all factors in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) are not in the same priority level. Hence, in decision making situation, it is usual for decision makers to consider different priority factors. So, considering the prioritization of the factors, a reliability allocation method is proposed here to overcome the shortcomings of the FOO technique. Also, a case study on reliability allocation in airborne radar system is considered here to verify the efficiency of the proposed approach. Finally, the results are calculated in different optimistic and pessimistic view point and compared with the FOO technique. This comparison exhibits the advantages and supremacy of the proposed approach.