Application of an evolutionary fuzzy system for the estimation of workforce deployment and cross-training in an assembly environment

Owing to the increased customer demands for make-to-order products and smaller product life-cycles, today assembly lines are designed to ensure a quick switch-over from one product model to another for companies' survival in market place. The complexity associated with the decisions pertaining to the type of training and number of workers and their exposition to the different tasks especially in the current era of customized production is a serious problem that the managers and the HRD gurus are facing in industry. This paper aims to determine the amount of cross-training and dynamic deployment policy caused by workforce flexibility for a make-to-order assembly. The aforementioned issues have been dealt with by adopting the concept of evolutionary fuzzy system because of the linguistic nature of the attributes associated with product variety and task complexity. A fuzzy system-based methodology is proposed to determine the amount of cross-training and dynamic deployment policy. The proposed methodology is tested on 10 sample products of varying complexities and the results obtained are in line with the conclusions drawn by previous researchers.

Method for Creative Behavioral Design Based on Analogy and Blending from Natural Things

In the near future, robots and CG (computer graphics) will be required to exhibit creative behaviors that reflect designers’ abstract images and emotions. However, there are no effective methods to develop abstract images and emotions and support designers in designing creative behaviors that reflect their images and emotions. Analogy and blending are two methods known to be very effective for designing creative behaviors. The aim of this study is to propose a method for developing designers’ abstract behavioral images and emotions and giving shape to them by constructing a computer system that supports a designer in the creation of the desired behavior. This method focuses on deriving inspiration from the behavioral aspects of natural phenomena rather than simply mimicking it. We have proposed two new methods for developing abstract behavioral images and emotions by which a designer can use analogies from natural things such as animals and plants even when there is a difference in the number of joints between the natural object and the design target. The first method uses visual behavioral images, the second uses rhythmic behavioral images. We have demonstrated examples of designed behaviors to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.