Deriving a systematic approach to changeable manufacturing system design

It has long been argued that Factories are long life and complex products. The complexity of designing factories, and their underlying manufacturing systems, is further amplified when dealing with continuously changing customer demands. At the same time, due to research fragmentation, little if any scientific explanations are available supporting and exploiting the paradigm that "factories are products". In order to address this weakness, this paper presents research results arising from a comparative analysis of systematic "product design" and "manufacturing system design" approaches. The contribution emerging from this research is an integrated systematic design approach to changeable manufacturing systems, based on scientific concepts founded upon product design theories, and is explained through a case study in the paper. This research is part of collaboration between the CERU University of Malta and IAO Fraunhofer aimed at developing a digital decision support tool for planning changeable manufacturing systems.peer-reviewe

An integrated Approach Using Optimization Methods and Simulation in Maintenance Strategies Analysis

In this paper, a new approach which integrates the optimization algorithms and the simulation is proposed to analyse the systems maintenance strategies in which operating characteristics deteriorate with use and whose lifetime and repair duration are random. The simulation language RAO (Resource-Action-Operation) is used to implement the proposed approach. Numerical examples are carried out to validate the approach flexibility and efficiency. RAO is a discrete events simulator. This tool proposes a great flexibility of modelization, that allows one to keep track of each resource's evolution and even offers animation possibilities