Improving material efficiency is widely accepted as one of the key challenges facing manufacturers in the future. Increasing material consumption is having detrimental impacts on the environment as a result of their extraction, processing and disposal. It is clear that radical improvements in material efficiency are required to avoid further environmental damage and sustain the manufacturing se...

Flexible manufacturing Systems are automated manufacturing systems which have job shop flexibility and flow shop efficiency. One of the major concerns in Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is the minimization of the total flow of material through the system. Facility layout design deals with the arrangement of machines, in order to minimise the total flow of parts in the system. The commonly u...

This paper describes a prototype of a discrete event simulator Y4 (Yield Forecaster) capable of simulating defect related yield loss as a function of time, for a multi-product IC manufacturing line. The methodology of estimating yield and cost is based on mimicking the operation and characteristics of a manufacturing line in the time domain. The paper presents a set of models that take into acc...

We introduce a methodology for automated production planning of semiconductor manufacturing based on iterative linear programming (LP) optimization and discrete-event simulation calculations. The LP formulation incorporates epochdependent parameters for flow times from lot release up to each operation on each manufacturing route. LP-derived release schedules are used as input to the simulation ...

Deadlock-free operation is a principal requirement for an automated manufacturing system. The part types passing through the manufacturing system are characterized by the sequence of the manufacturing resources required for their completion. The method partitions the sequence into alternate subsequences consisting of deadlock-free resources and deadlock-risk resources. The set of deadlock-free ...

This paper presents a conceptual hierarchically structured multi-agent architecture for manufacturing systems’ modelling. The architecture provides a suitable decision-making framework where each agent represents a node in the hierarchic tree of manufacturing systems such as the company as a whole, each plant within the company, each cell or line within the plant, each machine in a cell or line...

Using product line automatic production procedure and the management system of modern manufacturing industry for reference, a new model of integrated software engineering environment based on product line is put forward, and framework and realizing mechanism of the new model is mainly analyzed in this paper. The new model takes product line core asset (resource) components as the agent bus. The...