Renewable energy has become a vital source for generating electricity, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and eliminating the reliance on non-renewable forms of energy. This work highlights on the urgent need for clean, efficient, and resilient energy sources through the development of advanced optimization methods. The hybrid solar-wind systems are meant to maximize power generation. Complexity arises when determining the optimum design, size, functionality, materials, distribution, and mechanism of each system as they are combined to ensure system reliability and optimal outcomes. The development of the new optimization methods (such as genetic algorithms, heuristic approaches, and particle swarm techniques) was generated to overcome the encountered barriers in traditional or classical approaches; such as in iterative techniques and linear programming methods. Additionally, the multi-objective analysis has been involved in various studies where vectors, criteria, and alternatives are applied with respect to the main objectives. However, further research efforts are encouraged to innovatively optimize hybrid solar-wind systems; including the optimization of hybrid solar-wind sizing (HSWS), design, capacity, battery storage, energy distribution systems and techno-economical considerations.

Sustainable design is a universal concern and due to that it becomes significant reference in numerous industries especially furniture products. In order to overcome the difficulties in Furniture Industry to determine the sustainable design to their products, the concept of Sustainable Design Index (SDI) was proposed in this paper. The SDI construction is combined with the designer’s daily activities and the design process, in this research the open plan system (OPS) is used for the subject matter. This paper presents several design tools and strategies which are integrated to support the development of sustainable design index as a solution. It is important to develop a model or method for formulating the SDI for industry to work with particularly the product’s sustainability performance strongly linking to the consumer’s satisfaction. In order to develop a robust SDI representation, an innovative approach for structured and systematic sustainable furniture design is proposed mainly based on modular product architecture, reconfigurability, using design structure matrix (DSM) and axiomatic design (AD). The SDI implementation is to enhance the designer by seamlessly integrating SDI algorithms within the CAD design environment and designers’ design operations.

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Training and education have become increasingly crucial in obtaining new skills in a variety of fields, especially in assembly and disassembly operations. The main issue in mechanical engineering, particularly in the assembly department, was that automobile engine components assembly was found to be complicated and challenging to assemble using an existing method, where they only rely on a video-based method. The purpose of this paper is to create interactive Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications that allow users to efficiently assist and complete the assembly tasks. In this work, the authors designed and developed a fully immersive VR application using an HTC Vive headset and two AR applications (marker-less AR application and marker-based AR application) using EPSON MOVERIO BT-300 (AR Smart Glasses). Fourteen engineering students from Universiti Putra Malaysia were selected for the experiment. They were divided into four groups: video-based group, VR-based group, marker-less AR group, and marker-based AR group. They are required to complete all four experiments (video-based experiment, VR-based experiment, marker-less AR experiment, and marker-based AR experiment). The results showed that the marker-less AR application is the best impressive method (37% better), the VR application is the second impressive method (23% better) followed by the marker-based AR application is the third impressive method (3% better) compared to the existing video-based guideline. Therefore, the students favored AR and VR applications rather than the existing method to be used in automobile engine assembly tasks.