Emmanuel Francalanza

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• B.Eng (Hons), MSc IPD, PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Malta

Due to highly competitive markets, constantly shifting consumer requirements, and technological advances, product families are continuously evolving over time. This product evolution leads to new part variants being added to the existing part mix. When at a future time the manufacturing system is not capable, as is or in a reconFigured state, to ma...

Changing production systems and product requirements can trace their origin in volatile customer behaviour and evolving product requirements. This dynamic nature of customer requirements has been described as a constantly moving target, thus presenting a significant challenge for several aspects of product development. To deal with this constant an...

In order to meet customer requirements, manufacturing companies need to cope with the challenge of constantly evolving product ranges. Breakthroughs in the analysis of big data will give us a better understanding of market trends and customer requirements, but there will always be some degree of uncertainty when foreseeing product evolution. Manufa...

It has long been argued that Factories are long life and complex products. The complexity of designing factories, and their underlying manufacturing systems, is further amplified when dealing with continuously changing customer demands. At the same time, due to research fragmentation, little if any scientific explanations are available supporting a...

Maintenance engineering has taken up more and more a strategic function in recent decades due to technological advancements and its role in asset productivity. Over time, a plethora of methods have been proposed, shifting from reactive approaches to complex, data-driven strategies focused on failure prediction (e.g. through Machine learning) and kn...

Human-centricity is at the frontier of the novel Industry 5.0 paradigm, in which the well-being of the operator is not solely acknowledged but is actively heeded to. One application of this is in human-robot collaboration (HRC). Working in proximity to a collaborative robot has stemmed productivity, flexibility and assistance, but has also amassed...

The incessant demand for the use of online tools in education and industry may strain the resiliency of Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in terms of resource availability, employment; and assurance of access. These factors, combined with the need for HEIs to be agile in adapting to the new normality, are worth investigating following Covid-19. Th...

Despite technological and medical advances, amputations continue to increase. Amputees face significant challenges when acquiring and using prosthetic devices, challenges which are made worse as their emotional needs, aspirations, mobility, prosthesis requirements and problems change over time. These challenges require custom solutions for each ind...

As the Industry 5.0 paradigm evolves to the forefront of research directions, a dissonance emerges between smart and sustainable elements. This stems from the misbalance of priorities appointed during the engineering design process. Selection of technology driven features, such as collaborative robots and IoT devices are often implemented at the ex...

The deployment of Digital Twins in the age of Industry 5.0 is shifting towards a more flexible, efficient, sustainable and human-centric approach; providing ample opportunities for the manufacturing field. Having said that, Digital Twins may prove time-consuming, infrastructure-demanding, and potentially overwhelming for hefty data acquisition with...

The World Bank has reported that over one billion individuals have a disability, implying that almost fifteen percent of the global inhabitants are susceptible to undergoing levels of discrimination, especially in employment. This issue may prevail on a manufacturing shop floor, whereby a wave of standardisation dominates such as in the design of s...

The physical construct of a dual ontological product is essential for those products which physically interact directly with humans, whereas the product's emotional construct interconnects with human cognition. Multitude of human factor aspects must be considered when designing dual ontological products. To increase the product's impact and reach,...

Inefficiencies within compressed air systems (CASs) call for the integration of Industry 4.0 technologies for financially viable and sustainable operations. A systematic literature review of intelligent approaches within CASs was carried out, in which the research methodology was based on the PRISMA guidelines. The search was carried out on 1 Novem...

Amputees face a number of challenges when acquiring and using a prosthesis, with major issues being the cost of the device, the time it takes for their custom prosthesis to be developed and delivered, as well as the challenges they face to get it regularly serviced and maintained. The other stakeholders involved, including the prosthetists and stan...

Dual ontological products are a physical construction and an emotional construction. Multitude of human factors must be considering when designing dual ontological products. To increase the product's impact and reach, designers should also understand the requirements of potential users. A design stage conflict exists between the emotional construct...

The industrial sector is a crucial economic pillar, seeing annual increases in the production output. In the last few years, a greater emphasis has been placed on the efficient and sustainable use of resources within industry. The use of compressed air in this field is hence gaining interest. These systems have numerous benefits, such as relative l...

The digital and technological transformation which has been ongoing for the past decade is leaving an ever-increasing impact on manufacturing. Technology changes have always presented a constant drive for the evolution and shifting paradigms in the manufacturing industry. The complexity of state-of-the-art technologies, such as Artificial Intellige...

Amputees face challenges with prosthesis such as cost, long delivery periods, as well as social discomfort. Simultaneously, the prosthetists and manufacturers have a difficulty to handle such diverse issues. We thus contribute a Prosthetic Life-Cycle Service System (ProLiSS) Framework, prescribed to involve amputees in different life phases. From a...

This study investigates the effects of ultraviolet radiation (UV) on mechanical properties of 3D printed parts made of polylactic acid (PLA). Groups of samples 3D printed from thermoplastic PLA by a material extrusion process (MEX) were subjected to artificial UV radiation of two different wavelengths, 310 nm UVB and 254 nm UVC in order to replicat...

The paper presents the ICARUS Pedagogical Framework, or Reference model to address development of innovative pedagogical approaches to overcome the actual effectiveness problems in development, acquisition and application of the required knowledge and skills for the concepts related to Industry 4.0. The aim of the Pedagogical Framework is minimum t...

The development of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) in the 2010s has paved the way to a digital transformation, fuelled by increased connectivity and intelligence in the manufacturing industry. This technological driven transformation has led to fast paced developments in a number of engineering fields in the past 10 years. Within hi...

The development and implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in industry have brought about the need to also update the skills of current and future engineers. Furthermore, training paradigms are shifting. The upcoming generation of learners has a greater and easier access to knowledge, yet finds difficulties in applying that knowledge in a comp...

Despite their significant use in industrial automation, compressed air systems have a typical efficiency of around 10–20%. Literature shows that data monitoring systems are being introduced to detect losses, however, demand side monitoring techniques make use of highly dedicated proprietary equipment which has a number of limitations. This study so...

Although digitization in the manufacturing industry has been going on for some years, the recent COVID-19 pandemic helped reveal a number of bottlenecks and challenges that still need to be overcome. Joint ongoing research by a number of European Universities aimed at developing a systematic training framework on Industry 4.0 happened to be perform...

The aim of this whitepaper is to develop recommendations for the adoption of AI in factories based on identified challenges, for long-term resilience in cognitive manufacturing. Link: https://worldmanufacturing.org/wp-content/uploads/06_Rauch.pdf

The development in the past decade of Industry 4.0 technologies has brought many new opportunities to manufacturers. The increased digitization of manufacturing operations has led to new modes of production and product development. This digitization has also increased the quantity of sensorial data which is easily available and which can be used to...

Technology changes present a constant drive for evolvement in the manufacturing industry. This development has brought about a complete change in the way the industry implements technologies. The complexity of state-of-the-art technologies is on the increase as new and unforeseen perils continue to emerge. One of the main challenges being faced is...

Motorcycle riders’ road experience, attitude and position have a large impact on safety. Besides these aspects, a motorcycle designer has to consider the aesthetical emotional value of such artefacts. This paper contributes a novel framework architecture supports designers to develop a rider-centred, safer motorcycle design, while at the same time...

In manufacturing, pneumatic powered components provide a safe and reliable opportunity to automate a production line. However, compressed air systems are notoriously expensive to operate as a result of incorporated system losses and inefficiencies. For this reason, typical systems have an output efficiency of 10 – 12%. This offers a significant imp...

In the manufacturing industry, pneumatic powered components provide a safe and reliable opportunity to automate a production line. However, compressed air systems are notoriously expensive to operate as a result of system losses and inefficiencies. Typical systems have an output efficiency of 10–12%. This offers a significant improvement opportunit...

When seeking new opportunities and markets, change is an inevitable reality which product development teams must embrace to maintain product relevance and competitiveness. In fact, one can observe many examples on the market of products and their constituent features evolving over time. This is done not only to meet changing requirements, but also...

Increasingly competitive markets are putting pressure on product development teams to design products which exploit an emotional connection to users in order to distinguish them from their competitors. Researchers at the University of Malta have been engaged in understanding the challenges of designing emotionally pleasing products by studying the...

Due to complex interdependencies, incomplete information and uncertainty in the manufacturing requirements, manufacturing system design can be described as a wicked problem. A wicked problem is an ill-defined problem, which makes it difficult to determine if a solution has been found and cannot be solved with traditional optimization approaches. Th...

As manufacturing enters a new paradigm of cyber production, new methods are required to support the production system design activity. These methods have to take into consideration both the cyber and physical aspects of the system design, whilst also satisfying requirements of modularity, connectivity and intelligence. This paper presents a modular...

The emergence of cyber physical production systems has brought with it an increased utilization of robotics in collaborative manufacturing environments. An approach to meet this demand is to democratize robotics by making cheaper more customizable robots that can be implemented by small and medium enterprises. To tackle this problem this research l...

Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) and Integrated Product Development (IPD) have both been identified as important drivers of an organization’s competitiveness and agility. However, their multi-faceted nature requires organizations to make manufacturing decisions without compromising any of the pillars contained within SM (economy, environment and soci...

The capital value of knowledge is fundamental in modern cyber-physical systems. The user is provided with information from multiple and sometimes conflicting sources. This large amount of information must then be analyzed and interpreted by the human brain. Information must be used in a profitable way, and transformed into useable knowledge, which...

In the manufacturing world, knowledge is fundamental in order to achieve effective and efficient real time decision making. In order to make manufacturing system knowledge available to the decision maker it has to be first captured and then modelled. Therefore tools that provide a suitable means for capturing and representation of manufacturing sys...

2212-8271 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of The International Scientific Committee of the 8th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology -DET 2014 – "Disruptive Innovation...

Mass customization and the evolution of products provide significant challenges to manufacturing system designers. Paradigms such as changeability, product process co-evolution and product platform development have been developed over the years to tackle these challenges. This research work identifies the synthesis decision-making activity in manuf...

This paper deals with the development of a computational framework that aims to facilitate innovative endeavours during product development. A problem analysis carried out revealed that both stakeholder collaboration and artefact simulation are considered important for supporting innovation, the first through the availability of more ideas and the...

Manufacturing system design is a complex and demanding activity and the system designer has to take many factors into consideration during the development process including the demand and technological requirements of the products or product families. Central to this activity is the synthesis decision making process, during which the designer defin...

In order to survive in the modern market, manufacturing companies need to invest in Advanced Product Development Technologies (APDTs). The problem many companies face, however, is the huge variety of possible technologies available. Examples of these are Stereo Lithography Apparatus (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Fused Deposition Modelling...