production planning is performed through diverse methods according to the type of the system it is structured upon. one of the most important steps before production planning is to determine which system best fits the firm, and how the facilities should be designed. both job-shop and group-technology systems have their own pros and cons, each of which is suitable to a specific kind of factory. ...

An agent-oriented methodology is presented for representation, acquisition, and processing of manufacturing knowledge along with analysis and modeling of an intelligent manufacturing system (IMS). An intelligent manufacturing system adopts heterarchical and collaborative control as its information system architecture. The behavior of the entire manufacturing system is collaboratively determined...

Material handling robots are routinely used for transferring parts in an interconnected multi-machine cell. The sequence of robot movements between machines is arrived at by the operator, either intuitively or by the use of some form of off-line analysis. It would be extremely beneficial if robots can be provided with additional intelligence to automatically sequence their control programs the...

In the context of manufacturing systems, scheduling refers to allocation of resources over time to perform a set of operations. Manufacturing systems scheduling has many applications ranging from manufacturing, computer processing, transportation, communication, health care, space exploration, education, distribution networks, etc. Scheduling is a process by which limited resources are allocate...

Input-output relationship, marginal productivity and marginal rate of technical substitution provide a useful insight about the potentiality of manufacturing firms. This study analyzes these important issues to describe the optimality in resource utilization of the manufacturing firms in the south-west region of Bangladesh. A translog production function has been estimated to describe the input...

In this paper we describe G/G/R+s multi- repairmen machining system with balking. The system consists of M operating machines, S spare machines, R permanent and s additional repairmen. Assuming the discrete flow of machines by continuous one, the diffusion approximation technique for the machine repair system has developed. The system will be in normal working mode if there is M operating machi...

This paper deals with the transient analysis of manufacturing systems in the presence of failures and repairs. The exact model is decomposed into 1) a structure state process, modeling the failure and repair events which occur at a slower time scale, and 2) a performance model, modeling the part processing and material movement events occurring at a faster time scale. The solutions of these two...

This paper presents the techniques of tool path planning and an activity-based manufacturing cost analysis for the simultaneous turn-mill machining. The new turn-mill machine tools allow the parallel processing of both multi-axis milling and turning operations simultaneously. Turn-mill machine tools have been identified to be able to significantly reduce the total setup time and manufacturing c...