A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

A distributed knowledge-based approach to flexible automation : the contract-net framework

Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-29)

Agent-based hierarchical production planning and scheduling in make-to-order manufacturing system

PublishedThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Nowadays, manufacturing organisations face increasing pressures from the frequent change in product type, continuous demand fluctuation and unexpected change in customer requirements. In order to survive in the turbulent environment, manufacturing organisations must become flexible and responsive to these dynamic changes in the business environment. This paper presents a hierarchical agent bidding mechanism that is particularly designed for Make-to-Order manufacturing system and attempts to enhance the operational flexibility of manufacturing system in dealing with dynamic changes in the business environment. The novelty of this mechanism is that it enables manufacturing resources to be self-organised cost-efficiently within structural constraints of manufacturing system for fulfilling customer orders. However, when orders cannot be fulfilled within the structural constraints of manufacturing systems, the mechanism can enable manufacturing resources to be regrouped flexibly across system boundaries but with minimum disturbances to existing system structure. Based on an example application to a manufacturing company, this paper demonstrates that the operational flexibility provided by this mechanism is able to help manufacturing system to respond demand fluctuation through balancing the capacity across the entire system. Meanwhile, this mechanism potentially enables manufacturing systems to deal with unexpected changes in product type. As long as the manufacturing system has the technicality required by a new product, this mechanism enables resources across the manufacturing system to be cost-efficiently and flexibly self-organised to fulfil the new product

A Review Of Design And Control Of Automated Guided Vehicle Systems

This paper presents a review on design and control of automated guided vehicle systems. We address most key related issues including guide-path design, estimating the number of vehicles, vehicle scheduling, idle-vehicle positioning, battery management, vehicle routing, and conflict resolution. We discuss and classify important models and results from key publications in literature on automated guided vehicle systems, including often-neglected areas, such as idle-vehicle positioning and battery management. In addition, we propose a decision framework for design and implementation of automated guided vehicle systems, and suggest some fruitful research directions