Alongside the development of high-speed rail, rail flaw detection is of great importance to ensure railway safety, especially for improving the speed and load of the train. Several conventional inspection methods such as visual, acoustic, and electromagnetic inspection have been introduced in the past. However, these methods have several challenges in terms of detection speed and accuracy. Combined inspection methods have emerged as a promising approach to overcome these limitations. Nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques in conjunction with artificial intelligence approaches have tremendous potential and viability because it is highly possible to improve the detection accuracy which has been proven in various conventional nondestr

Tungsten inert gas arc welding–based shaped metal deposition is a novel additive manufacturing technology which can be used for fabricating solid dense parts by melting a cold wire on a substrate in a layer-by-layer manner via continuous DC arc heat. The shaped metal deposition method would be an alternative way to traditional manufacturing methods, especially for complex featured and large-scale solid parts manufacturing, and it is particularly used for aerospace structural components, manufacturing, and repairing of die/molds and middle-sized dense parts. This article presents the designing, constructing, and controlling of an additive manufacturing system using tungsten inert gas plus wire–based shaped metal deposition metho

The research has designed for studying the relationship between manufacturing strategy and its flexibility under the flexible manufacturing system with their reflection on the competitive environmental performance of the firm. To interpret and tackle the problem, a hypothesis has formulated stating that “ the competitive performance of a firm is interpreted by the manufacturing strategy and flexibility which are derived from the firm and its business  strategies under the flexible manufacturing system”. Related literatures with their theoretical dissertations, which enhanced the thoughtful content, have analyzed. An illustrative case study on the flexible manufacturing system at Toyota Motors Corporation working at the g

     This article introduces the concept of finitely null-additive set function relative to the σ– ring and many properties of this concept have been discussed. Furthermore, to introduce and study the notion of finitely weakly null-additive set function relative to the σ– ring as a generalization of some concepts such as measure, countably additive, finitely additive, countably null-additive, countably weakly null-additive and finitely null-additive. As the first result, it has been proved that every finitely null-additive is a finitely weakly null-additive. Finally, the paper introduces a study of the concept of outer measure as a stronger form of finitely weakly null-additive.

Many organizations today are  interesting to implementing lean manufacturing principles  that should enable them to eliminating the wastes to reducing a  manufacturing lead time.  This paper concentrates on  increasing  the competitive level of the company in globalization markets and improving of the productivity by reducing the manufacturing lead time. This will be by using the main tool of lean manufacturing which is value stream mapping (VSM) to identifying all the activities of manufacturing process (value and non-value added activities) to reducing elimination of wastes (non-value added activities) by converting a manufacturing system to pull instead of push by applying some of pull system strategies a

The bandwidth requirements of telecommunication network users increased rapidly during the last decades. Optical access technologies must provide the bandwidth demand for each user. The passive optical access networks (PONs) support a maximum data rate of 100 Gbps by using the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique in the optical access network. In this paper, the optical broadband access networks with many techniques from Time Division Multiplexing Passive Optical Networks (TDM PON) to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Passive Optical Networks (OFDM PON) are presented. The architectures, advantages, disadvantages, and main parameters of these optical access networks are discussed and reported which have many ad