Design and Management of Manufacturing Systems

Although the design and management of manufacturing systems have been explored in the literature for many years now, they still remain topical problems in the current scientific research. The changing market trends, globalization, the constant pressure to reduce production costs, and technical and technological progress make it necessary to search for new manufacturing methods and ways of organizing them, and to modify manufacturing system design paradigms. This book presents current research in different areas connected with the design and management of manufacturing systems and covers such subject areas as: methods supporting the design of manufacturing systems, methods of improving maintenance processes in companies, the design and improvement of manufacturing processes, the control of production processes in modern manufacturing systems production methods and techniques used in modern manufacturing systems and environmental aspects of production and their impact on the design and management of manufacturing systems. The wide range of research findings reported in this book confirms that the design of manufacturing systems is a complex problem and that the achievement of goals set for modern manufacturing systems requires interdisciplinary knowledge and the simultaneous design of the product, process and system, as well as the knowledge of modern manufacturing and organizational methods and techniques

The co-incident flow of work pieces and cutting tools in a restricted category of flexible machining cells

The work reported in this thesis describes research carried out into the detailed design and operation of Flexible Machining Cells (FMC) incorporating automated work and tool flow, dual flow. Three modes of cell management are considered for dual flow cells, where the author examines both their operational and economic performance. A framework is defined for investigating these dual flow cells, and a structured approach providing a novel and detailed modelling capability is described. The question of how this approach compares to single flow modelling and the additional or alternative requirements for dual flow modelling is examined via the following key areas; the specification of material handling requirements, tool transportation and issue and finally, the control required to examine the interaction between the two flows operating concurrently. The framework is tested for its industrial applicability via an industrial case study. A major aim of this study is to examine the view that a hybrid cell management strategy, competitive management, could outperform the other strategies examined. The aim of this methodology is to provide a solution for the control of FMCs. Emphasis is placed on the ease of control and how the loading and control rules selection can maximise economic enhancement of a cells performance

Mathematical Modelling and Optimization of Flexible Job Shops Scheduling Problem

The flexible job shop scheduling problem (F-JSSP) is mathematically formulated. One novel position-based and three sequence-based mixed integer linear programming models are developed. Since F-JSSPs are strongly NP-hard, MILPs fail to solve large-size instances within a reasonable timeframe. Thus, a meta-heuristic, a hybrid of artificial immune and simulated annealing (AISA), is developed for use with larger instances of the F-JSSP. To prove the efficiency of developed MILPs and AISA, they are compared against state-of-the-art MILPs and meta-heuristics in literature. Comparative evaluations are conducted to test the quality and performance of the developed models and solution technique respectively. To this end, size complexities of the developed MILPs are investigated. The acquired results demonstrate that the proposed MILPs outperform the state-of-the-art MILP models in literature. Likewise, the proposed AISA outperforms all the previously developed meta-heuristics. The developed AISA has successfully been applied to a realistic case study from mould and die industry

Factories of the Future

Engineering; Industrial engineering; Production engineerin