Development of Autonomous Distributed Manufacturing Systems (adims) Concept and Example of It’s Application in the Casting Industry

This research deals with the development of Autonomous Distributed Manufacturing Systems (ADiMS) Concept and an example of its application in the casting industry. ADiMS is a manufacturing system concept developed to increase the flexibility of the system. In ADiMS, each of the manufacturing system elements (holon) had been modelled as an intelligent element with the result that each element had capability to manage information, communicate each other, and to make decision. The whole manufacturing problems are solved by each element and coordination among them. In the modelling at the developed application software, UML (Unified Modelling Language) was used, where each element of manufacturing system was modelled as a class as in the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concept. As a case study, the development of the concept analysis and application software to manage casting industry, that has a piston ring as its main product, was carried out. The application software that had been developed, that still in a proto type stage, has five main functions that are an order management system, Quality Assurance, Warehouse management, Jig & Fixture Storage Area management, and Sand Casting Area management functions. Inside each function, there are several objects that working together with coordination among each others. The application showed that all main functions can make communication through the database server. The developed application that discussed at this research has a client server technology. The same web-based system with the n-tier technology is still in the development stage now.