Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems (VCMSs) are based on a highly flexible manufacturing concept designed to improve the performance of classical Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMSs) and job shop manufacturing environments by creating virtual grouping of the resources temporarily in the production planning and control system. In an environment with fluctuating demand and unpredictable parts...

Grouping the machines and parts in a manufacturing system, based on similarities is known as cell formation problem. The problem is clustering items to form identified and specific groups having similar properties. Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) can be defined as an application of Group Technology (GT) philosophy that allows decomposing a manufacturing system into subsystems to make it eas...

Multivariate statistical representations have been widely used in the process manufacturing industries for process performance monitoring, in particular for the detection of changes in current operation and the onset of process disturbances or faults. Applications of the technology have focused to a lesser extent on manufacturing processes where drift occurs over time as part of normal process ...

As a consequence of increased rates of new product introduction, rapid technology changes and global competition, consumers around the world have a broader product menu from which to choose. To compete effectively, companies must continually work to improve quality, productivity and flexibility. Flexible manufacturing systems, FMS, are often cited as the means to achieve both flexibility and pr...

This paper considers the integration of assembly operations and product structure to Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) design so that to correct the drawbacks of previous researches in the literature. For this purpose, a new mathematical model is developed which dedicates machining and assembly operations to manufacturing cells while the objective function is to minimize the intercellular mov...

One of the most important effective factors in the economic growth is the increased efficiency of manufacturing sectors. Thus, it is necessary to review and measure the efficiency of business units from a variety of dimensions to plan the increase of efficiency in future courses. One of these dimensions is the economics to scale (ES) referring to the concept of enhanced earnings due to the incr...

Complete List of Authors: Yang, Xiang; University of Kaiserslautern, Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Production Systems Malak, René; University of Kaiserslautern, Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Production Systems Lauer, Christian; University of Kaiserslautern, Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Production Systems Weidig, Christian; University of Kaiserslautern, In...

The modern manufacturing environment is highly turbulent so as to satisfy the dynamic needs of customers’. To enable the achievement of competitiveness in this complex business environment, newer manufacturing strategies have been introduced for enabling waste elimination and enhancing flexibility and responsiveness of systems. Fit manufacturing is a competitive manufacturing paradigm which inc...

Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex and capital-intensive processes composed of several hundreds of operations. In today's competitive business environments, it is more important than ever before to manage manufacturing process effectively to achieve better performances in terms of customer satisfaction and productivity than those of competitors. To obtain such fruitful outco...

-In this paper we advocate the use of multi-agent systems in cellular manufacturing. More specifically, we argue that multi-agent systems can respond to the flexibility and adaptivity needs of modern manufacturing. The central issue of the design of such a multi-agent manufacturing system is the choice of the granularity level: are agents defined by decomposing the whole process across tasks or...