Complex systems traditionally involve partners from different companies with their own domains of expertise. During design stages, these partners need to exchange pieces of information and to debate around architectural and implementation choices. Model Driven Engineering for System Engineering simplifies system knowledge sharing, while simulation provides sound results to drive debate. As a co...

Tool environments supporting the development of complex products need to be open and flexible. These requirements cannot be fulfilled in an adequate way by predefined coordination structures and interfaces. This paper presents a framework for control integration in open tool environments. The approach is based on a component model which supports the description of tool interconnections in an ab...

We consider a tool requirements planning problem in a flexible manufacturing system with an automatic tool transporter. The problem considered here is that of determining the number of tool copies of each tool type with the objective of minimizing total tardiness of orders with distinct due dates for a given budget for tool purchase. For the problem, several heuristic algorithms are developed u...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the locality exhibited by the SPECfp95 benchmark suite. This study is performed by means of a tool that is based on a static analysis enhanced by a simple profiling. This new approach results in a fast, accurate and flexible data locality analysis tool. It is fast because its run-time overhead is almost negligible , having a slowdown of 0.05. Besides, ...

In order to adapt to a rapid changes of manufacturing orders, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) advances into the direction that machines become further versatile functionally and that tools are controlled by fast tool delivery device. Versatile machine can perform a variety of operations when it is supplied with the required tools. Tool management is among the essential elements in the succ...

The problem addressed in this paper is the tool switching problem for an automated manufacturing environment, when each tool may occupy more than one slot of the tool magazine. A machine processes parts automatically by using a limited capacity tool magazine. Providing a tool that is needed for a certain processing operation is not in the magazine, a tool switch must occur before the job can be...