In recent years, artificial neural networks have been applied to solve a variety of problems in numerous areas of manufacturing at both system and process levels. The manufacturing applications of neural networks comprise the design of manufacturing systems (including part-family and machine-cell formation for cellular manufacturing systems); modeling, planning, and scheduling of manufacturing ...

Manufacturing has faced significant changes during the last years, namely the move from a local economy towards a global and competitive economy, with markets demanding for highly customized products of high quality at lower costs, and with short life cycles. In this environment, manufacturing enterprises, to remain competitive, must respond closely to customer demands by improving their flexib...

Over the last four decades of research, numerous cell formation algorithms have been developed and tested, still this research remains of interest to this day. Appropriate manufacturing cells formation is the first step in designing a cellular manufacturing system. In cellular manufacturing, consideration to manufacturing flexibility and productionrelated data is vital for cell formation....

Virtual cellular manufacturing systems (VCMS) have come into existence, replacing traditional cellular manufacturing systems (CMS), to meet highly dynamic production conditions in terms of demand, processing times, product mix and processing sequence. While cell formation phase of VCMS has been dealt quite voluminously, worker assignments phase has gained momentum recently after researchers sta...

We consider cellular mobile systems where in order to limit hando blocking probability, admission control is applied to new call requests and capacity is reserved for future hando attempts. We show that due to this advance reservation the achievable e ciency of the system has an upper bound even if no constraint is speci ed on the blocking probability of new call requests. As a reference case, ...

In the 80’s, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) concept was adopted as a solution to all the problems in manufacturing. However, it was soon realized that the evolving demands for manufacturing systems were not handled by CIM. New alternatives rise, and especially Agent-Based Manufacturing and Holonic Manufacturing Systems, for cooping with today’s manufacturing systems requirements. From ...

Modern manufacturing systems should satisfy emerging needs related to sustainable development. The design of sustainable manufacturing systems can be valuably supported by simulation, traditionally employed mainly for time and cost reduction. In this paper, a multi-purpose digital simulation approach is proposed to deal with sustainable manufacturing systems design through Discrete Event Simula...

Cellular manufacturing system, an application of group technology, has been considered as an effective method to obtain productivity in a factory. For design of manufacturing cells, several mathematical models and various algorithms have been proposed in literature. In the present research, we propose an improved version of discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) to solve manufacturing cell ...