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 ...

REMORA aims at offering an agile robotic solution for manufacturing tasks done on very large parts (e.g.: very long and slender parts found in aeronautic industries). For such tasks, classical machine-tools are designed at several tens of meters. Both their construction and operation require huge infrastructure supports. REMORA is a novel lightweight concept and flexible robotic solution that c...

Flexibility has been widely recognized as a key competitive factor for manufacturing firms coping with the increasingly turbulent manufacturing environment today. Establishing a flexible surface mount assembly (SMA) system is critical for organizations to achieve a cost-effective assembly and gain competitive advantages in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry. To find a practicable...

Flexible manufacturing Systems are automated manufacturing systems which have job shop flexibility and flow shop efficiency. One of the major concerns in Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is the minimization of the total flow of material through the system. Facility layout design deals with the arrangement of machines, in order to minimise the total flow of parts in the system. The commonly u...

Flexible manufacturing systems are complex, stochastic environments requiring the development of innovative, intelligent control architectures that support agility and re-configurability. ADACOR holonic control system addresses this challenge by introducing an adaptive production control approach supported by the presence of supervisor entities and the self-organization capabilities associated ...

Manufacturing Flexibility is the ability of a manufacturing system to respond, at a reasonable cost and appropriate speed, to planned or unplanned changes in external or internal environments. It is accomplished by multidimensional attributes of the manufacturing system. In the global, rapidly changing modern market conditions manufacturing flexibility becomes a necessity in many industrial env...

The production scheduling process in manufacturing systems is a complex problem in which finding a suitable production scheduling can extremely increase the effectiveness of highly flexible production processes. Nevertheless, this high flexibility makes the production scheduling and acquisition of relevant data quite complicated. Therefore, there is a strong demand for a universal and flexible ...

Flexible manufacturing and customization is a considerable topic in modern manufacturing automobile industry. However, challenges still remain on the responsiveness of production system to the fluctuation of production demand. In this paper we developed a flexible machine layout that is not restricted to equal size machines. The layout optimizes the trade-offs between increased material handlin...

This article presents an approach to embedding expert systems within an object oriented simulation environment. The basic idea is to create classes of expert system models that can be interfaced with other model classes. An expert system shell is developed within a knowledge-based design and simulation environment which combines artificial intelligence and systems modeling concepts. In the give...