With increasing frequency the news media reports that the planet is warming, pollutants are contaminating the environment, energy costs are rising, and precious natural resources are dwindling. These reports are sounding an alarm that we need to change the way we manufacture products so as to minimize the negative impact of industrial operations on the environment, the workforce, and the surrou...

A two-year program was conducted to develop and commercially manufacturing technologies to: • Enable significant reductions in the costs of castings, • Increase the complexity and dimensional accuracy of castings, and • Reduce the development times for delivery of high quality castings. implement selected casting The industry-led R&D project was cost shared with NASA's Aerospace Industry Techno...

Computer based discrete event simulation (DES) is one of the most commonly used aids for the design of automotive manufacturing systems. However, DES tools represent machines in extensive detail, while only representing workers as simple resources. This presents a problem when modelling systems with a highly manual work content, such as an assembly line. This paper describes research at Cranfie...

An kind of operation optimization model is put forward on the basis of analyzing manufacturing system characteristics with consideration of optimization. The Features of the model are real-time, dynamic, multi-objective and multistage. The algorithm called ‘Harmonizing Cluster Results’ for the model is presented in order to solve the difficulties of solution for the manufacturing system operati...

Virtual commissioning (VC) of manufacturing systems has been researched for more than 10 years. Its intention is to test manufacturing systems and associated control programs through simulation conducted before the real systems are realised. The expected benefits in reducing debugging and correction efforts expended during real commissioning, however, can only be achieved if sufficiently detail...

Discrete event simulation is generally recognized as a valuable aid to the strategic and tactical decision making that is required in the evaluation stage of the manufacturing systems design and redesign processes. It is common practice to represent workers within these simulation models as simple resources, often using deterministic performance values derived from time studies. This form of re...

Manufacturing enterprise decisions can be classified into four groups: business decisions, design decisions, engineering decisions, and production decisions. Numerous physical and software simulation techniques have been used to evaluate specific decisions by predicting their impact on the system as measured by one or more performance measures. In this paper, we focus on production decisions, w...

Simulation technology is underutilized by the manufacturing industry. Standard data interfaces, among simulation modules or between simulation and other software applications, could make information sharing effective and efficient, and hence promote utilization of simulators. An information model that represents machine shop data and facilitates data sharing among the manufacturing execution sy...

Powerful new features may be incorporated to simulation environments by exploiting existing Web technology. To demonstrate this, WebManSim, a prototype web-based manufacturing system simulator has been developed. The proposed system includes project management principles, supports communication and voting and provides workflow facilities and simulation program generation execution capabilities....

The presented work deals with a special modelling method that is relevant to analyse reconfigurable manufacturing systems during their design phase and to anticipate their behaviour when they themselves are viewed as anticipatory systems. The technique named nested simulation consists in the simulation of elements that simulate their own environment using their own models. It enables a design p...