Rapid Sample Product Trial Manufacture Technique for Developing Water Meter New Products

This paper advances the viewpoints and methods of the rapid sample product trial manufacture technique for developing water meter new products by CAD and simulation, computer virtual assembling and optimizing, rapid machining process and measurement etc. as the design and sample product trial manufacture process of water meter new products are long in product development period, and low in product development efficiency in the present time.

STATE SPACE MODELING OF DIMENSIONAL MACHINING ERRORS OF SERIAL-PARALLEL HYBRID MULTI-STAGE MACHINING SYSTEM

The final product quality is determined by cumulation, coupling and propagation of product quality variations from all stations in multi-stage manufacturing systems （MMSs）. Modeling and control of variation propagation is essential to improve product quality. However, the current stream of variations （SOV） theory can only solve the problem that a single SOV affects the product quality. Due to the existence of multiple variation streams, limited research has been done on the quality control in serial-parallel hybrid multi-stage manufacturing systems （SPH-MMSs）. A state space model and its modeling strategies are developed to describe the multiple variation streams stack-up in an SPH-MMS. The SOV theory is extended to SPH-MMS. The dimensions of system model are reduced to the production-reality level, and the effect and feasibility of the model is validated by a machining case.

RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE HERBAL MEDICINES AND PRACTITIONERS WORKING GROUP IN THE UK: RAISING THE STANDARDS OF MANUFACTURED HERBAL PRODUCTS

The UK government set up a Herbal Medicines and Practitioners Working Group(HMPWG)to assess possibilities of:1.Setting up Statutory Regulation of Herbal Medicine Practitioners;2.Allowing continued public access to valuable herbal medicines.On 26th March 2015 the HMPWG published the key recommendations after over a year of meetings and consultation with experts.

Government Subsidies,Resource Misallocation and Manufacturing Productivity

Government subsidies for some firms will have effects on the market entry,exit and scale of firms,result in misallocation of resource between firms,and reduce manufacturing productivity.Using data of Chinese industrial enterprises from 1998 to 2007,this paper studies the effect and micro-mechanism of misallocation caused by government subsidy on manufacturing productivity.Decomposition of manufacturing productivity indicates there is resource misallocation between firms and decreasing of manufacturing productivity.Empirical study shows that government subsidies constitute an important factor inducing this resource misallocation.Subsidies change extensive and intensive margins of market,distort resource allocation between firms and reduce manufacturing productivity,and the resource misallocation is more serious in industries with higher proportion of state-owned assets.Specifically,subsidies hinder entry and exit of firms in extensive margins,with subsidized firms having lower propability of market entry and exit compared with unsubsidized firms;subsidies promote scale of subsidized firms and crowds out market share of unsubsidized firms in intensive margins.The implication of this paper is that when providing subsidies government should take into consideration their effect on the firms’dynamic and resource allocation in the frame of general equilibrium.

Production Control of a Manufacturing System with Random Machine Breakdowns

We consider a serial production system with machine breakdowns, where the machine at each station alternates between up and down states with exponential up and down time distributions. To obtain insight about the optimal production strategy, we focus on one production station. Its production process (output) and that of the previous station (input) are modeled by point processes with stochastic intensities. Our objectives is to control both input and output intensities such that expected discounted profit is maximized. We show that the optimal control policy is of a threshold type which is characterized by two threshold values.When each station in the serial system has reliable machines, the well known Kanban production strategy, which was first developed in Toyota Motor Co. of Japan, is usually used to control the production process at each station. Our result in this paper implies that, among other things, the traditional Kanban control rule has to be modified if the production environment is random.