Modeling of a manufacturing system enables one to identify the effects of key design parameters on the system performance and as a result to make correct decision. This paper proposes a manufacturing system modeling approach using a spreadsheet model based on queuing network theory, in which a static capacity planning model and stochastic queuing model are integrated. The model was used to impr...

The objectives of the research are to examine the energy utilization profile of the wood manufacturing industry with respect to system level production parameters and investigate the viability of specific energy efficiency measures. The Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) has conducted energy assessments in the wood manufacturing industrial sector in the State for several years. The energy utili...

The task of design, planning and operation of manufacturing networks is becoming more and more challenging for companies, as globalisation, mass customisation and the turbulent economic landscape create demand volatility, uncertainties and high complexity. In this context, this paper investigates the performance of decentralised manufacturing networks through a set of methods developed into a s...

The crucial step in the design of a Cellular Manufacturing (CM) system is the Cell Formation (CF) problem. This problem consists of identifying the part families and the machine groups and, consequently, forming manufacturing cells. The aim of this paper is to formulate a new multivariate approach based on a correlation analysis for solving CF problem. The proposed approach is carried out in tw...

In this paper, we propose a neuro-genetic decision support system coupled with simulation to design a job shop manufacturing system by achieving predetermined values of targeted performance measures such as flow time, number of tardy jobs, total tardiness and machine utilization at each work center. When a manufacturing system is designed, the management has to make decisions on the availabilit...

Uncertainties are significant characteristics of today’s manufacturing systems. Holonic manufacturing systems are new paradigms to handle uncertainties and changes in manufacturing environments. Among many sources of uncertainties, failure prone machines are one of the most important ones. This paper focuses on handling machine failures in holonic manufacturing systems. Machine failure will red...

Abstract: This paper studies multi-product production manufacturing systems with in-line quality control. Quality control is carried at inspection stations located within a production line. Quality control has an impact on performance of the system: throughput decreases and resource utilization increases. Production lines are modeled as a multi-product Open Jackson Network, where stochastic cha...

Job shop scheduling (JSS) is a problem which involves an assignment of a set of tasks to the machines in a predefined sequence in order to optimize one or more objectives considering job performance measures of the system. It’s a multi-objective, multi-criteria optimization problem. A job shop environment consists of ‘n’ jobs. Each job has a given machine routine in which some machines could be...

This paper describes an ongoing research project in distributed, agent-based manufacturing scheduling systems which exhibit collective system behavior. A scheduling system is described which exhibits purely low-level, reactive behavior. Two types of agents comprise the collective: part agents and machine agents. The collective is a mixedinitiative system in which agents representing parts attem...