Invention Description Recent technological innovations in the areas of additive manufacturing and collaborative robotics have paved the way toward realizing the concept of on-demand, personalized production on the shop floor. Additive manufacturing process can provide the capability of printing highly customized parts based on various customer requirements....

In many production systems like semiconductor manufacturing, food industry, and battery production, the amount of time a part can spend in successive buffers is limited in many production systems because of possible quality concerns. If a part's residence time exceeds these limits, it must be trashed, which results in waste and lost output. To prevent...