The quality consistence and machines’ utilization of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) strongly depend on the statistical process control (SPC) and the correct fault diagnosis of equipments. An FMS can be modeled by the Colored Timed Petri Net (CTPN). However, the CTPN models of most FMSs lack the activities of the statistical process control (SPC) and fault diagnosis, and they lead to the ...

Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) are adopted to process different goods in different mix ratios allowing firms to react quickly and efficiently to changes in products and production targets (e.g. volumes, etc.). Due to their high costs, FMSs require careful design, and their performance must be precisely evaluated before final deployment. To support and guide the design phase, this paper p...

Recently, Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) have been widely used for modelling asynchronous discrete events exhibited in dynamic systems, while Fuzzy Petri Nets (FPNs) used for systems that involve approximate reasoning and uncertainty knowledge inference. In this paper, we propose a net-based structure, the so-called Fuzzy Coloured Petri Nets (FCPNs) to model both the dynamic behaviour and inexact p...

The aim of this paper is to present a hybrid group decision model for evaluating flexible manufacturing systems(FMSs), in which the information about attribute weights is completely unknown, and the attribute values take the form of triangular fuzzy numbers. In this proposed methodology, the voting method is adopted to calculate the attribute weights by aggregating the decision-makers’ attitude...

Since the late 1970s when the ®rst collection of papers on scheduling of ¯exible manufacturing systems (FMSs) has been published, it has been one of the most popular topics for researchers. A number of approaches have been delivered to schedule FMSs including simulation techniques and analytical methods, whereas the former is the most widely used tool for modeling FMSs. The objective of this pa...

Recently, a mixed integer data envelopment analysis (DEA) model has been proposed to find the most BCC-efficient (or the best) decision making unit (DMU) by Toloo (2012). This paper shows that the model may be infeasible in some cases, and when the model is feasible, it may fail to identify the most efficient DMU, correctly. We develop an improved model to find the most BCC-efficient DMU that r...

In this paper, we establish that maintaining a balanced workload on each machine over time stochastically minimizes the work-in-process inventory in certain types of flexible manufacturing systems (FM%) with finite or infinite common input buffer storage and an ample buffer et each machine. The results obtained here complement those obtained by Stecke and Morin (1985), in which it is establishe...

The scheduling problem of robotic material handlers in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is NP-hard. This paper proposes a state-dependent algorithm for the FMS robot scheduling problem in make-to-order (MTO) environments for mass customization (MC). A mathematical model of the problem is formulated. A computational study of the proposed algorithm is performed. The algorithm is compared to ...

This paper initially discusses the state-of-the-art and the current limitations in the modeling, scheduling and control of flexible automation. To model flexible automation, it is argued that the simulation tools must provide enhanced capabilities to consider both controller interactions and the flow of resources that support production. It is also demonstrated that scheduling and control must ...

Deadlock-free operation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is an important goal of manufacturing systems control research. In this work, we develop the criteria that real-time FMS deadlock-handling strategies must satisfy. These criteria are based on a digraph representation of the FMS state space. Control policies for deadlock-free operation are characterized as partitioning cuts on this...