A #exible manufacturing system (FMS) is designed to combine high productivity and production #exibility. But the design of a FMS requires high investment. Furthermore, this preliminary phase is strategic and the decisions at this stage have to be made very carefully in order to ensure that the manufacturing system will successfully satisfy the demands of an ever-changing market. Discrete-event ...

Loading in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is affected by the characteristics of the FMS under analysis, by the type of plant where the FMS is introduced, and by the production planning hierarchy where the loading module operates. We propose an analysis of the various aspects that influence the problem formulation, identifying the alternatives available in real systems and possible future...

The competition for limited resources can produce deadlocks in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Petri nets are an effective way to model, analyze, and control deadlocks in FMS. Our previous work proposes elementary siphons as an important concept in investigating the deadlock problems in Petri nets. This paper presents an elementary siphon-based deadlock prevention method. It then performs...

Current strategic and technological trends in discrete-part manufacturing require extensive and exible automation of the underlying production systems. However, even though a great deal of work has been done to facilitate manufacturing automation at the hardware component level, currently there is no adequately developed control methodology for these environments. In particular, it has recently...

In this paper a complex scheduling problem in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has been addressed with a novel approach called knowledge based genetic algorithm (KBGA). The literature review indicates that meta-heuristics may be used for combinatorial decision-making problem in FMS and simple genetic algorithm (SGA) is one of the meta-heuristics that has attracted many researchers. This nove...

S3PR, Systems of Simple Sequential Processes with Resources, is a class of Petri Nets to describe concurrent systems with analyses to include model checking capabilities. The structural object of siphons is extensively used to characterize and analyze deadlock situations in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) that are modeled on Petri Nets (PN). The purpose of this work is to structure a model ...

This paper deals with the specification and analysis of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). We use a timed process algebra called BTC (for Bounded True Concurrency) that we have developed from CSP and which takes into account that the available resources in a system have to be shared by all the processes. It is able to consider heterogeneous resources of any type (preemptable and non-preempta...

Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) enhances the firm's flexibility and responsiveness to the ever-changing customer demand by providing a fast product diversification capability. Performance of an FMS is highly dependent upon the accuracy of scheduling policy for the components of the system, such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs). An AGV as a mobile robot provides remarkable industrial capa...

Purpose – To provide a good insight into the use of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that is a multiple criteria decision-making methodology in evaluating flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). Design/methodology/approach – In this study AHP is used to the decision by a tractor manufacturing plant to implement FMS. Also sensitivity analysis is conducted to see how realistic the final outcome is...

Flexible manufacturing system is a system that is able to respond to changed conditions. In general, this flexibility is divided into two key categories and several subcategories. The first category is the so called machine flexibility which enables to make various products by the given machinery. The second category is routing flexibility enabling to execute the same operation by various machi...