A flexible manufacturing system is a high automated GT machine cell, consisting of a group of processing workstations (usually CNC machine tools), interconnected by an automated material handling and storage system, and controlled by a distributed computer system. The reason the FMS is called flexible is that it is capable of processing a variety of diffrent part styles simultaneously at the va...

One of the most revolutionary concepts of Machining Processes to emerge in the last two decades has been the concept of Flexible Manufacturing System (F.M.S.). It is a concept of machining where a set of machine tools can be used to perform a wide range of machining operations to produce a variety of products. This dynamic nature of the machine tools can be achieved by developing a beautiful am...

We consider a flexible manufacturing facility that can be operated in any of m different modes. While running in mode k certain intermediate products are consumed and other intermediate or finished products are created. There may be variability in the manufacturing process, as well as random arrivals of raw materials and orders for finished products. We establish conditions that ensure demands ...

One of the major problems confronting the search for efficiency in flexible manufacturing systems is the problem of loading and scheduling. This abstract presents a new method to solve such problems. The methodology, which is based on the use of genetic algorithms, allows simple codification of problems and thus facilitates its use. Two kinds of solution are proposed – that is, loading and sche...

There has been some uncertainty concerning the conditions under which a manufacturing system may be termed 'flexible'. To clarify this confusion eight types of flexibilities are defined and described. A FLEXIBLE Manufacturing System (FMS) is an integrated, computer-controlled complex of automated material handling devices and numerically controlled (NC) machine tools that can simultaneously pro...

In this work an approach to analyze non-deterministic execution plans for flexible manufacturing systems is presented. This approach consists of modeling the system using coloured Petri nets and then, by simulation, discover the possible executions for the system. After, model checking is used to prove that the model behavior do not deviate from the planning. Based on this approach it is possib...

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This paper focuses on a method for synthesizing deadlock avoidance controllers in flexible manufacturing systems. The modelling process of a supervisory policy that enforces liveness is realized with Petri nets. Petri nets are a popular modelling paradigm for a wide class of discrete event systems. Our supervisory policy is based on the next two steps in modelling process: a) A bottom-up approa...

A tool for performance evaluation will be presented in this paper. The tool is named BAL and is based on the timed process algebra BTC incorporating resources as well. BAL begins by first making the syntactic analysis of the system specification, and then draws up its relevant transition graph by applying the rules of the operational semantics and solves a performance optimization problem relev...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility to react in the case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility can be divided into two categories: ١. Machine flexibility, covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part, and ٢....