Organizational alternatives for flexible manufacturing systems

There is an increasing importance of different productive architectures related to worker involvement in the decision making, where is given due attention to the intuitive capabilities and the human knowledge in the optimization and flexibilization of manufacturing processes. Thus having reference point architecture of a flexible manufacturing and assembling system existent at UNINOVA-CRI, we will present some exploratory hypothesis about applicability of the concept of hybridization and its repercussions on the definition of jobs, in those organizations and in the formation of working teams.flexibility; robotics; work organization; manufacturing industry

Heuristic Solutions for Loading in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Production planning in flexible manufacturing system deals with the efficient organization of the production resources in order to meet a given production schedule. It is a complex problem and typically leads to several hierarchical subproblems that need to be solved sequentially or simultaneously. Loading is one of the planning subproblems that has to addressed. It involves assigning the necessary operations and tools among the various machines in some optimal fashion to achieve the production of all selected part types. In this paper, we first formulate the loading problem as a 0-1 mixed integer program and then propose heuristic procedures based on Lagrangian relaxation and tabu search to solve the problem. Computational results are presented for all the algorithms and finally, conclusions drawn based on the results are discussed

Effectiveness analysis of flexible manufacturing systems

"August 1985."Bibliography: leaf 30.Lisa Anne Washington, Alexander H. Levis

Dynamic Scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

To date, group scheduling research has primarily focused on examining the performance of different group heuristics under various experimental conditions. However, the dynamic selection of group heuristics has not received sufficient attention from researchers. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a mechanism for the dynamic selection of group heuristics from several candidate alternatives by exploiting real time information from the Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). In this regard, two tools, viz., Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique Exploiting Ranks (SMARTER), are used to develop models for part type and family selection. The experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed models are better than the common group scheduling heuristics under varied experimental conditions.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Planning transport sequences for flexible manufacturing systems

When designing a manufacturing system it is important to plan what the system should do. One important activity in most manufacturing systems is to transport products or resources between different positions. In a flexible manufacturing system it can be challenging to design and plan these transport operations due to their complex logical behavior. This paper presents a method that identifies, creates and visualizes these transport operations based on inputs from a standard virtual manufacturing tool and a high level product operation recipe. The planning of the created transport operations is transformed into a problem of finding a non-blocking solution for a discrete model of the product refinement

Network flow optimization in flexible manufacturing systems

Bibliography: leaf 6.Caption title.Supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant APR76-12036 National Science Foundation Grant DAR 78-17826by J. Kimemia, S.B. Gershwin

Maximum-Entropy Principle in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

It is shown that the entropy of the joint probability distribution of the queue lengths of the M machine-groups in a closed queuing network model of a flexible manufacturing system is maximum when the loads on the different machine-groups are equal for both single-machine machine-groups and for those multiple-machine machine-groups of which group sizes are equal. It is also shown that for unequal machine-group-sizes, the entropy is not maximum when the workload is balanced. The simultaneous variations of the entropy function of the load distribution, the entropy function of joint probability distribution lengths of queues and the expected production function are studied in order to investigate the relationship between the information content and productive capacity of manufacturing systems. Four measures of load balance in a flexible manufacturing system are given

Performance evaluation of generic flexible manufacturing systems

This study describes a potential tool to evaluate the performance of Flexible Manufacturing Systems on the basis of both conventional design parameters (MTTF, MTTR, MTR) and other factors, including the use of the Markov process. System effectiveness is used as a performance measure, and credits are granted if only some of the systems are functional. To improve performance, a central storage, whose spares level is optimized heuristically, was installed to replenish spares for failing equipment. Such performance measurement technique is likely to be very useful for most real life FMS environments. The model is currently being tested for a wide range of applications