Data-Driven Causal Modeling of the Manufacturing System

In manufacturing system management, the decisions are currently made on the base of ‘what if’ analysis. Here, the suitability of the model structure based on which a model of the activity will be built is crucial and it refers to multiple conditionality imposed in practice. Starting from this, finding the most suitable model structure is critical and represents a notable challenge. The paper deals with the building of suitable structures for a manufacturing system model by data-driven causal modelling. For this purpose, the manufacturing system is described by nominal jobs that it could involve and is identified by an original algorithm for processing the dataset of previous instances. The proposed causal modelling is applied in two case studies, whereby the first case study uses a dataset of artificial instances and the second case study uses a dataset of industrial instances. The causal modelling results prove its good potential for implementation in the industrial environment, with a very wide range of possible applications, while the obtained performance has been found to be good

Assembly sequence planning using hybrid binary particle swarm optimization

Assembly Sequence Planning (ASP) is known as a large-scale, timeconsuming combinatorial problem. Therefore time is the main factor in production planning. Recently, ASP in production planning had been studied widely especially to minimize the time and consequently reduce the cost. The first objective of this research is to formulate and analyse a mathematical model of the ASP problem. The second objective is to minimize the time of the ASP problem and hence reduce the product cost. A case study of a product consists of 19 components have been used in this research, and the fitness function of the problem had been calculated using Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), and hybrid algorithm of BPSO and Differential Evolution (DE). The novel algorithm of BPSODE has been assessed with performance-evaluated criteria (performance measure). The algorithm has been validated using 8 comprehensive benchmark problems from the literature. The results show that the BPSO algorithm has an improved performance and can reduce further the time of assembly of the 19 parts of the ASP compared to the Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithm. The novel hybrid BPSODE algorithm shows a superior performance when assessed via performance-evaluated criteria compared to BPSO. The BPSODE algorithm also demonstrated a good generation of the recorded optimal value for the 8 standard benchmark problems