The question addressed is how the strategic choice of flexible manufacturing technologies intensifies and interacts with competition among firms. We focus on the manufacturing flexibility that allows a firm to produce its outputs at shorter expected delivery time. We find that increasing the number of firms will decrease firms’ incentive to acquire more flexible manufacturing technologies. r 20...

Cell production in which only a few human operators manufacture products by themselves is popular in Japan due to its flexibility. However, the decrease in the number of young persons in developed countries will make it difficult to do in the near future. Therefore, cell production using robots is going to be needed. A cell production system using a robot and automatic machines having special f...

a  commercial  ti-nanoxide  was  deposited  on  in-doped  sno2 (ito) polymer  substrates by  tape casting  technique with different thicknesses  (7,  14  and  36μm)  to  be  used  as  photoelectrode  in flexible  dye-sensitized  solar  cells  (dsscs).  ruthenium  dye  was adsorbed on each tio2 film for 24 h. the resulting photoelectrodes were used to form flexible dsscs in combination with elec...

It is shown that flexible manufacturing cells can conveniently be represented and evaluated by colored Petri nets in which transitions represent operations performed by the machines of the cell and the transporting robot, tokens represent parts transported by the robot from one machine to another, and the colors are used to indicate different scheduling policies for the same cell.

The paper presents the main design concepts of a hyper-flexible cell for low-volume industrial aircraft manufacturers. The cell is served by two cooperative robots, each of them equipped with a simple and reliable adaptive prehensor, purposely developed for the robust handling of limp carbon-fiber preforms. Some details are given about the adopted picking technology and results obtained on a pu...

scheduling has become an attractive area for artificial intelligence researchers. on other hand, in today's real-world manufacturing systems, the importance of an efficient maintenance schedule program cannot be ignored because it plays an important role in the success of manufacturing facilities. a maintenance program may be considered as the heath care of manufacturing machines and equip...

The Supervisory Control Theory is applied to a manufacturing cell commanded by a programmable logic controller (PLC). By means of local modular approach a methodology that exploits modularity of the plant and of the behavioral specifications models optimal supervisors are obtained without state-space explosion. For the purpose of simplifying the ladder diagram implementation in the PLC, reduced...