The recent manufacturing environment is characterized as having diverse products due to mass customization, short production lead-time, and unstable customer demand. Today, the need for flexibility, quick responsiveness, and robustness to system uncertainties in production scheduling decisions has increased significantly. In traditional job shops, tooling is usually assumed as a fixed resource....

In order to develop, test, and validate system control software for managing flexible manufacturing systems, most laboratories have constructed an experimental testbed using actual manufacturing equipment. These experimental systems typically occupy a large amount of lab space, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct, and require considerable human expertise to operate. In addition, ...

The use of transactions in flexible manufacturing systems is expected to result in a number of advantages like increased software reliability and minimized restart times in the case of system or machine failures. Here, an architecture of a system for handling processes on machine tools under transactional protection is briefly presented. Special attention must be drawn to the component which de...

In this paper, scheduling problems in Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) are studied. The scheduling objective is to minimize the makespan. We used a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the optimization scheduling problem. We have developed one FMC with industrial characteristics with the objective of studying scheduling problems in these types of manufacturing systems (single machine scheduling...

In today’s manufacturing community, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are becoming important. There is a global trend towards flexible manufacturing systems with an increasing number of countries competing for a share of the world market. FMS are increasingly required for companies to meet the demand for high quality, reasonably priced products. FMS allow a manufacturer to quickly change pro...

In recent years, a great deal of research has been focused on preventing deadlock in Flexible Manufacturing Systems. Policies based largely on Petri net models have been presented in the literature. Recently, a quite different approach has been developed based on supervisory control theory, and it has been adapted to solve the nonblocking maximally permissive control problem in various resource...

Determining the production capacity of flexible manufacturing systems is a very important issue in the design of such systems. We propose an approach for determining the production capacity (i.e., the maximum production rate) of a flexible manufacturing system with several part types, dedicated pallets, and fixed production ratios among the different part types. We show that the problem reduces...

Due to the complexity of scheduling flexible manufacturing systems, the generation of production schedules requires an intelligent technique. Many artificial intelligence techniques such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and neural networks have been successfully applied to the scheduling of advanced manufacturing systems. One such system is Robotic Flexible Assembly Cells (RFACs). Few studies...

-. The goal of this paper is to show and justify the reasons to develop a new part coding systems that includes a more complete characterization of the parts. This new coding system not only could be used in common applications, also in computing process planning tasks. Particularly, this paper shows a possible application related with the conceptual design of Flexible Manufacturing Systems and...

Symmetric mathematical programming is used to analyze the optimality of balancing workloads t~ maximize the expected production in a single-serve~closed queuing network model of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). In particular, using generalized concavity we prove that, even though the production function is not concave, balancing workloads maximizes the expected production in certain types...