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...

A generic event control framework is presented for a class of modular ̄exible manufacturing systems (FMSs). A modular FMS is characterized as a set of ̄exible workstations inter-connected by a material handling system consisting of a transporter and a stocker. Many of the existing FMS implementations in industry fall into this class. Furthermore, the modularity also allows the capability to e€e...

In this paper the capability of a new approach to the detailed evaluation of production systems behaviour is investigated. Formal verification techniques, whose natural application domain is the design phase of IT systems, are used to prove structural properties of production systems. These techniques employ formal models (usually based on the classic theory of finite state automata) for system...

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...

Competitiveness and rapid expansion of flexible manufacturing system (FMS), as one of the industrial alternatives, has attracted the attention of many practitioners and academicians. Globalization has further encouraged FMS development into distributed, self-reliant units of production center. Flexible manufacturing system in distributed system (FMSDS) considers multi-factory environments, wher...

The design and use of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) involve some intricate operations research problems. FMS design problems include, for example, determining the appropriate number of machine tools of each type, the capacity of the material handling system, and the size of buffers. FMS planning problems include the determination of which parts should be simultaneously machined, the opt...

This contribution presents a novel approach to address the scheduling of resource-constrained flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). It deals with several critical features that are present in many FMS environments in an integrated way. The proposal consists in a constraint programming (CP) formulation that simultaneously takes into account the following sub-problems: (i) machine loading, (ii) ...

Purpose – The actual benefits of the AMT solidarity to the manufacturing system, classified as systemic, will only be acquired and identified if the current design and organizational structure become compatible with the change being introduced. The purpose of this paper is to present a review for the organizational design development related to AMT assumption and the green manufacturing (GM) in...

Purpose – The actual benefits of the AMT solidarity to the manufacturing system, classified as systemic, will only be acquired and identified if the current design and organizational structure become matchable with the change being introduced. The purpose of this paper is to present a review for the organizational design development related to AMT assumption and the green manufacturing (GM) inv...