During the past half century, market competition has been very intense and production companies have been trying to find more efficient ways to manufacture their products. While during the period 1960 to 1970 manufacturing cost was the primary concern, later it was followed by product quality and delivery speed. New strategies had to be formulated by companies to adapt to the environment in whi...

It will be described a case study in the context of Continuous Education in New Manufacturing Systems. In the case study the term New Manufacturing Systems will be restricted to Flexible Manufacturing Systems context. The term Continuous Education will be analyzed as one six years experience in teaching and researching activities at post-graduation level at the cefet-pr.cpgei. The education-res...

In practical manufacturing settings it is often possible to obtain, in real-time, information about the operation of several machines in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) that can be quite useful in scheduling part flows. In this brief paper the authors introduce some scheduling policies that can effectively utilize such information (something the policies in [1] do not do) and they provide...

Product form queueing networks (PFQN) and generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) have emerged as the principal performance modelling tools for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). In this paper, we present integrated PFQN-GSPN models, which combine the computational efficiency of PFQN and representational power of GSPN by employing the principle of flow-equivalence. We show that FMS that inc...

A scheme for the scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) has been developed which integrates neural networks, parallel Monte-Carlo simulation, genetic algorithms. and machine learning. Modular neural networks are used to generate a small set of atlractive plans and schedules from a larger list of such plans and schedules. Parallel Monte-Carlo Simulation predicts rhe impact of each on...

The exibility required of an agile manufacturing system must be achieved largely through computer software. The system's control software must be adaptable to new products and to new system components without becoming unreliable or diicult to maintain. This requires designing the software speciically to facilitate future changes. As part of the Agile Manufacturing Project at Case Western Reserv...

Flexibility has been widely recognized as a key competitive factor for manufacturing firms coping with the increasingly turbulent manufacturing environment today. Establishing a flexible surface mount assembly (SMA) system is critical for organizations to achieve a cost-effective assembly and gain competitive advantages in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry. To find a practicable...

REMORA aims at offering an agile robotic solution for manufacturing tasks done on very large parts (e.g.: very long and slender parts found in aeronautic industries). For such tasks, classical machine-tools are designed at several tens of meters. Both their construction and operation require huge infrastructure supports. REMORA is a novel lightweight concept and flexible robotic solution that c...

this paper deals with the problem of forbidden states in discrete event systems modeled by petri net. to avoid the forbidden states, some constraints which are called generalized mutual exclusion constraints can be assigned to them. enforcing these constraints on the system can be performed using control places. however, when the number of these constraints is large, a large number of control p...

Constantly changing business conditions require a high level of flexibility in business processes as well as an adaptive and fully interoperable IT infrastructure in today’s manufacturing environments. The lack of flexibility prevents manufacturing companies from improving their responsiveness and adapting their workflows to turbulent scenarios. In order to achieve highly flexible and adaptive ...