Traditional manufacturing has relied on dedicated mass-production systems to achieve high production volumes at low costs. As living standards improve and the demands for new consumer goods rise, manufacturing flexibility gains prominence as a strategic tool for rapidly changing markets. Flexibility, however, cannot be properly incorporated in the decision-making process if it is not well defin...

The cell formation (CF) is one of the most important steps in the design of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS), which it includes machines’ grouping in cells and part grouping as separate families, so that the costs are minimized. The various aspects of the problem should be considered in a CF. The machine reliability and the tool assigned to them are the most important problems which have t...

The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has attracted substantial amount of research effort during the last twenty years. Most of the studies address the issues of flexibility, productivity, cost, and so forth. The impact of flexible lines on product quality is less studied. This paper intends to address this issue by applying a Markov model to evaluate quality performance of a flexible manufac...

3D printer technology employs the Additive Manufacturing (AM) process which is very popular method of layered manufacturing. 3D printer has huge application to manufacture small amount of fresh, customized & durable prototypes in a short time thus the concept of 3D printing technique is also referred to as rapid prototyping (RP) technique. 3D printer is one of the most promising fabrication too...

Additive manufacturing is now mature and is becoming a mainstream production technique for various industries. It is important that engineering services organizations equip themselves to provide a new range of services in this sector. This paper presents an engineering process framework for evaluating and adopting additive manufacturing. It describes tools developed to improve engineering servi...

Process understanding is emphasized in the process analytical technology initiative and the quality by design paradigm to be essential for manufacturing of biopharmaceutical products with consistent high quality. A typical approach to developing a process understanding is applying a combination of design of experiments with statistical data analysis. Hybrid semi-parametric modeling is investiga...

The manufacturing environment these days is characterised by rapid change, posing new challenges and problems to the production and operations manager in the industry. Under this circumstances, process flexibility is fast becoming a major priority for many organisations as they attempt to deal with these changes. In response to the need for process flexibility, increasing attention is being giv...

Because of the nature of conventional 0-1 part-family incidence matrix, a multi-cell flexible manufacturing systems (MCFMS) using conventional part-family formation algorithms, such as array-based clustering, similarity coefficient-based clustering, and mathematical programming, in a cellular manufacturing mode can assign a part family only to one machine cell. The consequence is that each part...

This paper proposes an Art Modified Single Linkage Clustering approach (ART-MOD-SLC) to solve cell formation problems in Cellular Manufacturing. In this study, an ART1 network is integrated with Modified Single Linkage Clustering (MOD-SLC) to solve cell formation problems. The Percentage of Exceptional Elements (PE), Machine Utilization (MU), Grouping Efficiency (GE) and Grouping Efficacy (GC) ...