This special issue consists of eight selected and expanded papers from the second International Manufacturing Leaders Forum (IMLF-2005).
The Centre for Advanced Manufacturing Research (CAMR) at the University of South Australia launched the International Manufacturing Leaders Forum (IMLF) series in 2002 to bring together leaders of industry and research in order to identify and solve difficult problems facing manufacturers in the current global economic climate. The aim of the IMLF is to provide an informal setting and a unique experience for the leaders of manufacturing around the world to share their views and experience in a productive atmosphere.
Following the success of IMLF-2002, CAMR in partnership with IBM hosted the Second IMLF (IMLF-2005) as an expanded but a unique conference at Glenelg beach, South Australia. The third IMLF was held in Taiwan during 23–25 October 2006. It was hosted by Industrial Technology Research Institute, National Taiwan University and Ministry of Economic Affairs, in co-operation with the CAMR.
The theme of IMLF-2005 was Global Competitive Manufacturing. Many key issues that are important to industry and academic researchers were discussed at the IMLF-2005 in parallel sessions. About 200 leaders and emerging leaders in manufacturing industry and research, from 14 countries attended this informative and prestigious forum and mingled with global leaders in research and manufacturing.
The IMLF-2005 proceedings consisting of 71 papers presented at the forum were published by CAMR. Since the main aim of the forum was to foster a closer interaction between research institutions and industry to find solutions for the problems that the industry is facing today, as a unique arrangement, the forum had 15 keynote speakers and research paper presentations were reduced to about 65. The research presentations addressed the following 12 themes:
Adaptive and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems | |||||
Distributed and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems | |||||
Integration of Manufacturing Systems | |||||
Leadership & Innovation | |||||
Micro-CMM and Nano-Fabrication | |||||
Monitoring and Control of Manufacturing Process | |||||
Novel Manufacturing Techniques | |||||
Optimisation of Production Flow | |||||
Product Development | |||||
Prototyping, Tooling and Testing | |||||
Robotics | |||||
Supply Chain and Logistics | |||||
The papers presented in this special issue of the International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing represent 8 of the best papers initially presented at IMLF2005 and represent a broad range of process, systems and management issues relating to manufacturing. These papers which were selected, substantially extended and reviewed by two new referees, who were not the reviewers of the conference papers, are summarized below.
The first paper, “Strategic manufacturing system and process innovation through elimination of trade-offs” by Shahbazpour and Seidel examines the practical issues surrounding trade-offs and manufacturing strategy, and offers a framework for better management of trade-offs and their elimination.
The second paper by Trappey et al. is entitled “Developing silicon intellectual property E-trade mechanisms for system on chip design and integration”. This paper explores the use of intelligent mobile agents and fuzzy evaluation models which are built into a knowledge services and trade platform for Integrated Circuits and acquiring silicon intellectual property information needed for complex system-on-chips design and fabrication.
In the next paper, by Cao et al. the “Application of statistical process control (SPC) in injection mould manufacturing”; the authors present the application of SPC in the manufacture of injection mould using short-run SPC methods. The proposed approach involves methods and procedures of defining and identifying the SPC process for the standardized and non-standardized parts.
The fourth paper in the issue, “Surface preparation and coating of metal coils by using a fully integrated manufacturing system” by Barletta et al., the authors define a novel fully integrated system for cleaning, pre-treatment and powder coating of metal coils.
In the paper by Yandra and Tamura titled, “A new multiobjective genetic algorithm with heterogeneous population for solving flowshop scheduling problems”. The authors outline a new genetic algorithm featuring heterogeneous population to solve multiobjective flowshop scheduling problems.
The next paper by Boswell and Chandratilleke, examines the effectiveness of an air-cooling technique based on jets to prolong the effective life cycle of cutting tools in machining. Titled “The introduction of an environmental cooling method is proved by using a reduced tool life cycle time method” the paper shows that air-cooling is an effective method of cooling cutting tool tips.
The penultimate paper of the issue, is the “Development of a robot control method for curved seal extrusion for high productivity in an advanced Toyota production system” by Sakai and Amasaka. The paper describes a robot control method for global production which is applied to several applications in order to improve productivity in the automotive industry.
In the final paper, titled “Metal foams for structural applications: design and manufacture”. Barletta et al. describe the influence of operative parameters upon manufacturing of aluminium foams. An experimental approach based upon DOE techniques was employed to study the influence of several process parameters, on the kinetics of foaming process.
Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who submitted the papers to this special edition, and their time and effort in improving their contributions to comply with the reviewers' comments and the suggestions by the guest editors.