In today’s very competitive, dynamic and unpredictable manufacturing environments it is critical to improve manufacturing performance in order to be able to compete. Flexibility becomes an important characteristic of manufacturing systems and organizations; thus the flexible manufacturing systems (FMS’s) are becoming popular in today’s scenario. A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) incorporate...

This paper presents a novel, multi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for a cell formation problem (CFP) with alternative means. Due to existing contradiction among objectives, three are considered: 1) Minimizing the total cost consisting of; intercellular movements, purchasing, operation, and maintenance; 2) maximizing the utilization of machines in the system; 3) mini...

Scheduling is an important tool for a manufacturing system, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a production process. In manufacturing systems, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by assigning a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation...

Reconfigurable machining system (RMS) is a new class of manufacturing system recently proposed in [1], which aims at combining the high throughput of dedicated manufacturing lines (DML) with the flexibility of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). An RMS can simultaneously manufacture multiple product types with high throughput comparable to a DML, making it an ideal choice for the high-volume ...