Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

Design and development of an emulated human cognition using novel 3D neural networks

This paper describes the development of an Emulated Human Cognition (EHC) which is designed and based on a replicated human brain with a right- and a left- hand lobe, one a deductive side and the other a generic one. Right-hand lobe consists of a newly designed Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with a multi-hidden layer topology. Left-hand lobe is a newly designed 3-dimensional cellular neural network. The input variables presented to the EHC are immediately analysed for it to decide which lobe should be activated. The EHC, when fully developed, has almost an unlimited memory capacity and is capable of immediate recall of any data in its almost unlimited memory locations. EHC has been used in several applications where neural networks have been used to establish relationship between two or more sets of variables. In this paper the EHC has been used to forecast demand for a given product

Machine-Part cell formation through visual decipherable clustering of Self Organizing Map

Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers.Comment: 18 pages,3 table, 4 figure