A make-to-order business model requires manufacturing control to face customised product variability and traceability. Considering the product as central to the automation rationale provides each product occurrence with informational and decisional capabilities. This paper considers a formal framework for such product-driven automation within the context of the Supervisory Control Theory. Two i...

The combination of multi-functional machines and mobile robots supports the emergence of highly flexible intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS). In this kind of manufacturing system, some machines must stay fixed at previously established positions (heavy equipment) but some types of multi-functional machines (small flexible equipment and mobile robots) can stay in one position for one or seve...

Manufacturing flexibility is one of the key determinants of development of modern production systems. The article presents the importance of flexibility factor in the process of manufacturing systems development during the 20 th century. In particular, craft manufacturing, dedicated manufacturing systems (DMS) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) were characterized. Finally, actual problems...

In this research paper cellular manufacturing is discussed under conditions of changing product demand. Traditional cell formation procedures ignore any changes in demand over time from product redesign and other factors. However given that in today‟s business environment, product life cycles are short, a framework is proposed that creates a multi-period cellular layout plan including cell rede...

OF THE PHD THESIS Researches on the design and management of manufacturing systems Ciprian CRISTEA Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania The PhD thesis is being structured on seven chapters. Each one of them begins with a set of objectives and it ends with the conclusions. Chapter 1 makes an introduction in the problem of manufacturing and contains an evolution of the manufacturing conce...

The control of an agile manufacturing system (AMS) is expected to be flexible, open, scalable and re-configurable so as to tackle the more complex and uncertain information flows. To meet these requirements, we propose agent-based control architecture for AMS, under which the functions of task planning, scheduling and dynamic control are integrated seamlessly. First of all, this paper introduce...