Xun Xu

University of Auckland · Department of Mechanical Engineering

Directional valves are critical functional components in hydraulic systems for diverting the flow of hydraulic oil and controlling oil pressure. Faults of the valves could lead to failure and even serious accidents in hydraulic systems. Fault diagnostic accuracy is directly influenced by the effectiveness of signal processing. Due to the harsh oper...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is crucial for enabling mass personalised manufacturing and human-centric manufacturing. The recent advancements in video understanding technology have enabled robots to interpret human actions from videos and discern the appropriate timing and nature of required robot assistance. However, current vision-based HRC sy...

Sustainability and precision are fundamental requirements for machining processes. In this study, novel energy consumption and surface roughness models are established to support the multi-objective (sustainability and precision) optimisation of machining processes. In this study, the following innovative characteristics are exhibited: (i) a physic...

In finishing simulations, achieving accurate results can be challenging due to the minimal amount of material removal and the limited measurement range of surface micro-topography instruments. To overcome these limitations, a novel high-fidelity modeling method combining image mosaic and wavelet decomposition technologies is proposed in this paper....

The increasing complexity of industrial systems demands more effective and intelligent maintenance approaches to address manufacturing defects arising from faults in multiple asset modules. Traditional digital twin (DT) systems, however, face limitations in interoperability, knowledge sharing, and causal inference. As such, cognitive digital twins...

Cloud manufacturing is a manufacturing paradigm that integrates wide-area distributed manufacturing resources for distributed services over the Internet. Scheduling is a critical technique that determines the overall performance of a cloud manufacturing system. Robots are an important type of manufacturing resource in cloud manufacturing. Schedulin...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been regarded as a technology with disruptive potential, offering the possibility of substantial reductions in the environmental footprint. The predominant approach to quantitatively evaluate AM’s environmental impacts relies heavily on the knowledge-intensive and time-consuming Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodolog...

With the rapid development of intelligent manufacturing, fault diagnostic methods based on deep learning have achieved impressive results. However, most methods require plentiful annotated samples and are based on the assumption that data from the source and target domains has the same distribution. These two conditions are difficult to satisfy in...

Cloud manufacturing is a manufacturing model that aims to provide on-demand resources and services to consumers over the Internet. Scheduling is one of the core techniques for cloud manufacturing to achieve the aim. Multi-task scheduling with dynamical task arrivals is an important research issue in the area of cloud manufacturing scheduling. Many...

Digital twin (DT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are powerful enablers for Industry 4.0 toward sustainable resilient manufacturing. Digital twins of machine tools and machining processes combine advanced digital techniques and production domain knowledge, facilitate the enhancement of agility, traceability, and resilience of producti...

Machining processes comprise numerous energy consumption activities. Given the significance of the circular economy and manufacturing sustainability to modern societies, it is paramount to design effective methodologies to accomplish energy-efficient machining processes. With this aim, this research presents a new approach of energy consumption opt...

The rapid implementation of the third-wave of IT innovation (e.g. smart, connected products, Internet-of-Things (IoT)) and the fourth Industrial Revolution (e.g. advanced operation technologies (OTs), Cyber-Physical Systems) have enabled the prevailing industrial digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where OT and IT are integrated in an Ind...

Cloud manufacturing is a service-oriented manufacturing model that offers manufacturing resources as cloud services. Robots are an important type of manufacturing resources. In cloud manufacturng, large-scale distributed robots are encapsulated into cloud services and provided to consumers in an on-demand manner. How to effectively and efficiently...

Cloud manufacturing is a manufacturing model that aims to deliver on-demand manufacturing services to consumers. Scheduling is an important problem that needs to be addressed carefully and effectively for cloud manufacturing to achieve that aim. Cloud manufacturing allows consumers to submit their requirements to the cloud platform simultaneously a...

In today's competitive market, mass personalisation has become a recognised necessity. However, ensuring data privacy and security while addressing the global cybersecurity challenge is crucial. While previous studies focused on meeting individual requirements, the emerging business opportunity of mass personalisation necessitates collaboration and...

Smart factory development renders an incredible opportunity for the manufacturing industry to join the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). However, an incredible number of conventional CNC machine tools are populating the world’s factories. Replacing these machines is an expensive process. This task might be considered unliftable by most s...

There is a recognized need for mass personalization for sustainability at scale. Mass personalization is becoming a leading research trend in the latest Industrial Revolution, whereas substantial research has been undertaken on the role of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies. The world is moving beyond mass customization, while manufacturing has led...

Cloud manufacturing was incepted a decade ago. Researchers have since been working on this topic to find more feasible, cost-effective, and less complex ways to implement cloud manufacturing platforms. This literature review analyzes the concept, characteristics of cloud manufacturing, and impediments to its quick adoption. In recent years, researc...

In the Industry 4.0 era, many emerging technologies are being embraced by manufacturers, including Digital Twin (DT) technology. DT has been known as a critical enabler for smart manufacturing and has attracted much attention from academia and industry. Meanwhile, the demand for DT platforms is growing as they enable more effective and easy develop...

The Digital Twin (DT) is defined as a digital representation of a physical entity in a virtual space. It has a wide range of research and applications in smart manufacturing. The development of DT can be reflected in scientific research, especially the most cited studies in the DT area. In this paper, 3763 articles on DT technology were obtained fr...

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a metal additive manufacturing (AM) process for fabricating high-performance functional parts and tools in various metallic alloys, such as titanium, aluminium and tool steels. One specific AM application is fabricating conformal cooling channels (CCC) in plastic injection moulding tool inserts to improve cooling e...

Traditionally, metal cutting fluid or lubricant is used in finishing operations of die and mould manufacture to reduce the rate of tool wear, which in turn improves surface quality. However, metal cutting fluid has negative effects on the environment, and also increases the total production cost. The minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) technique is...

Factor selection is crucial for any enterprise to make a quick and accurate quotation decision. For the objects of quotation with missing values, traditional rough sets construct their relations (e.g. tolerance, cover) either with objects having known values, or only with those that also include the missing values of the attribute domains. Such cla...

The recent shift to wellbeing, sustainability, and resilience under Industry 5.0 has prompted formal discussions that manufacturing should be human-centric-placing the wellbeing of industry workers at the center of manufacturing processes, instead of system-centric-only driven by efficiency and quality improvement and cost reduction. However, there...

Cloud manufacturing represents a service-oriented manufacturing paradigm that allows ubiquitous and on-demand access to various customisable manufacturing services in the cloud. While a vast amount of research in cloud manufacturing has focused on high-level decision-making tasks, such as service composition and scheduling, the link between field-l...

This paper proposes an intelligent STEP-NC-compliant setup planning method with the combination of rules, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and improved back propagation neural network (IBPNN). In the method, the STEP-NC-compliant manufacturing features are firstly automatically and reasonably grouped based on tool approach direction (TAD) selection...

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) intends to transform the manufacturing industry into a cloud-based service-provision commercial mode, which poses a great challenge for efficient service standard expression, publication, collaboration, and sharing. To address this issue, the authors previously proposed the Bill Of Standard manufacturing Service (BOSS) co...

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) hold a significant proportion in the economy and more than half of employment worldwide. Nowadays, many SMEs are embarking on a digital transformation journey by embracing and deploying the Fourth Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Industry 4.0) technologies with a vision of the “Factory of the Future”. Factory...

This highlight article proposes greentelligent manufacturing as a novel integrated manufacturing paradigm towards Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, not only for prioritizing green technology innovations, but also for achieving a smoother transition to a greener future. A framework, critical technical enablers, and promising research directions are dis...

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a metal additive manufacturing (AM) process for fabricating high-performance functional parts and tools in various metallic alloys, such as titanium, aluminium and tool steels. The process can produce geometrically complex features such as conformal cooling channels (CCC) in plastic injection mould inserts to impro...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) leads to mass personalisation as an emerging manufacturing paradigm. Mass personalisation focuses on uniquely made products to individuals at scale. Global challenges encourage mass personalisation manufacturing with efficiency competitive to mass production. Driven by individualisation as a trend and...

Industry 4.0, an initiative from Germany, has become a globally adopted term in the past decade. Many countries have introduced similar strategic initiatives, and a considerable research effort has been spent on developing and implementing some of the Industry 4.0 technologies. At the ten-year mark of the introduction of Industry 4.0, the European...

Details can be found on RCIM journal website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/robotics-and-computer-integrated-manufacturing/about/call-for-papers#special-issue-on-digitalization-and-servitization-of-machine-tools-in-the-era-of-industry-4-0

Based on advanced information and communication infrastructures and enabled with the cutting-edge information processing of cognitive computing, existing smart manufacturing systems have foreseen a prevailing tendency that approaches a higher automation level, i.e., Self-X (e.g., Self-configuration/optimization/adaptation). However, the readiness o...

Machine tools play a pivotal role in the manufacturing world since their performance significantly affects the product quality and production efficiency. In the era of Industry 4.0, machine tools are expected to have a higher level of accessibility, connectivity, intelligence, adaptivity, and autonomy. With the rapid development and application of...

In recent years, the development of machine-to-machine communication and the Industrial Internet of Things has paved the way for developing intelligent and self-governing autonomous machines in manufacturing businesses. These autonomous machines are capable of collecting data from various sensing devices and other interconnected machine systems by...

Digital Twin is one of the key enabling technologies for smart manufacturing in the context of Industry 4.0. The combination with advanced data analytics and information and communication technologies allows Digital Twins to perform real-time simulation, optimization and prediction to their physical counterparts. Efficient bi-directional data excha...

COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the reshaping of globalized manufacturing industry. Achieving a high level of resilience is thereby a recognized, essential ability of future manufacturing systems with the advances in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0. In this work, a conceptual framework for resilient manufacturing strategy enabled by Industri...

To guarantee the final assembly quality of the large-scale components, the assembly interfaces of large components need to be finish-machined on site. Such assembly interfaces are often in low-stiffness structure and made of difficult-to-cut materials, which makes it hard to fulfill machining tolerance. To solve this issue, a data-driven adaptive m...

Accurate anomaly detection is critical to the early detection of potential failures of industrial systems and proactive maintenance schedule management. There are some existing challenges to achieve efficient and reliable anomaly detection of an automation system: (1) transmitting large amounts of data collected from the system to data processing c...

Nowadays, industrial enterprises are changing their business models to meet the ever rising personalized product demands with smart manufacturing capabilities. By leveraging the power of advanced information technologies, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is about connecting all the industrial assets, including machines and control systems,...

Thin-walled parts are widely used in the aerospace, shipbuilding, and automotive industry, but due to its unique structure and high accuracy requirements, which leads to an increase in scrapped parts, high cost in production, and a more extended period in the trial machining process. However, to adapt to fast production cycles and increase the effi...

Recent advances in metal additive manufacturing (AM) technology enable complex conformal cooling channels to be fabricated for injection and blow mould inserts. However, high manufacturing costs hinder the technology being adopted in the mould-making industry. A cost-effective hybrid strategy was developed for the powder bed fusion (PBF) process in...

Since the inception of the concept of Industrial Internet in 2012, great progress in academic research and industrial applications has been made. Industrial Internet is an Internet for industry, which connects people, data and machines. In particular, Industrial Internet provides important infrastructure for manufacturing; smart manufacturing repre...

This paper presents an intelligent feature recognition method for STEP-NC-compliant manufacturing based on artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and back propagation (BP) neural network. In the method, after extracting the geometric and topological information from its STEP AP203 neutral file, the minimum subgraphs of a part are firstly constructed...

In recent years, advances in metal additive manufacturing (AM) technology make the fabrication of complex conformal cooling channels for injection mould possible. However, poor surface finish, inadequate dimensional accuracy, and high manufacturing costs impede the technology to be adopted in the mould-making industry as an alternative. In this stu...

Recent findings have shown that Digital Twin served multiple constituencies. However, the dilemma between the scope and scale needs a sophisticated reference architecture, a right set of technologies, and a suitable business model. Most studies in the Digital Twin field have only focused on manufacturing and proposed explicit frameworks and archite...

This paper presents a novel approach to implementing a smart manufacturing cell with distributed intelligence in the context of Industry 4.0. The system uses holons to model digital twins for a manufacturing cell and a Graph Node Network for production routing. The Graph Node Network allows dynamic generation of production routes for different part...

To guarantee the docking accuracy of large-scale components, their assembly interfaces usually need to be finished before the final assembly. However, there are some crucial problems affecting finishing efficiency and quality, e.g. use of hard-to-machine material at the assembly interface, manual interventions and process diversity in finish machin...

The rapid implementation of the third-wave of IT innovation (e.g. smart, connected products, Internet-of-Things (IoT)) and the fourth Industrial Revolution (e.g. advanced operation technologies (OTs), Cyber-Physical Systems) have enabled the prevailing industrial digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where OT and IT are integrated in an Ind...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) leads to an age of extraordinary changes through digital transformation. High customer demands and market competitions drive almost all business sectors to meet individuals’ requirements with a cost close to mass production. This paper aims to get the best out of Digital Twin capabilities for meeting...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are an integral element of Industry 4.0, and these systems are said to have become gradually more intelligent throughout the years. Moreover, as technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things evolve, the suspicion arises on whether machines and humans could cohesively share control in the system. De...

Smart manufacturing is arriving. It promises a future of mass-producing highly personalized products via responsive autonomous manufacturing operations at a competitive cost. Of utmost importance, smart manufacturing requires end-to-end integration of intra-business and inter-business manufacturing processes and systems. Such end-to-end integration...

Mass personalization has been an essential paradigm in the Industry 4.0 era. Mass personalization has long been a question of great interest in a wide range of industries. There is a recognized need for a cost-effective approach for dealing with a high number of unique products and services. There has been substantial research undertaken on the rol...

In a competitive and volatile market, the price is needed to make in consideration of the uncertain demands of the customers and the limited capacities of enterprises. This requires the coordination decisions on pricing, delivery and resource allocation to increase profit and guarantee service quality for firms. The joint decision on pricing and re...

Digital twin is a virtual model that represents physical entities in a digital manner. By leveraging means of data to simulate the behavior of physical entities in the real environment, the functions of physical entities can be optimized and expanded, through virtual and real interaction feedback, data fusion, decision making, and optimization. Des...

In this paper, a novel strategy for multi-part additive manufacturing (AM) production is proposed in order to reduce the total fabrication time. Traditionally, in a multi-part production process, parts are positioned on the print platform, and then are sliced into layers from the bottom to the top. In this manner, the time for moving the print nozz...

Cyber-Physical Machine Tools (CPMT) represents a new generation of machine tools that are smarter, well connected, widely accessible, more adaptive and more autonomous. CPMT could effectively collect all the information through the life-cycle of the machine tool, and this information should be utilized by different users under different scenarios a...