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This paper is concerned with the manufacturing strategy decision-making structure in multi-plant networks, i.e. how strategic manufacturing decision-making authority is distributed between the netw...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) due to its ability of being flexible in nature is concerned with automatic production of different parts in medium range. In short, it can be regarded as an au...

Efficiency and quality are major factors contributing to profits in manufacturing systems. Production downtime occurs during commissioning of a new system, adoption of new processes, system faults, or (un)planned maintenance; all of which result in reduced production and profit loss. Current techniques for evaluating change to a manufacturing system rely on simulation and modeling to verify processes, but ignore the physical interactions of the work parts on the system. Implementation techniques to evaluate commissioning focus on identifying issues with the cyber interfaces, ignoring the physical interfaces. To validate the cyber and physical interfaces simultaneously, physical work are sent through the system, resulting in significant costs from scrapped work parts and loss of production time. This research proposes a virtual fusion environment where the physical interfaces between a virtual work part and a manufacturing system can be investigated in real-time, on the physical system, without the...

Automation and advanced manufacturing technology solutions (AAMT) that present tangible and intangible benefits remain key drivers for manufacturers from both the developed and developing countries...

Additive manufacturing technology has been evolving for several years. New material options, better processing speeds and greater autonomy are some of the characteristics of this technology that are still under research. However, in its current state, many commercially available 3D printers are competing with traditional manufacturing techniques in the fabrication of end-use products. In this paper, different additive manufacturing technologies are compared with injection moulding in a real-world case study. The comparison is conducted in terms of lead time and total production cost. From the case under study, it becomes obvious that none of the additive manufacturing technologies examined is yet able to practically replace injection moulding for medium- and high production volumes. However, when considering low-volume production, both rapid tooling and additive manufacturing may offer an alternative that could result into shorter lead times and decreased total production costs. In addition, the introduct...

The rapid development of big data technologies can improve the maintainability of machines and equipment in manufacturing systems, which could impact the selection of the optimal system architecture. In this paper, two typical architectures for large manufacturing systems − serial lines in parallel and reconfigurable manufacturing systems − are considered, and their productivities are compared. A decision locus is calculated that divides the configuration space into two areas; in each area, one of the architectures is the preferred one. It is also investigated how the locus is affected by different parameters, such as system size, buffer capacity and machine or gantry maintainability. The analysis provides valuable managerial insights for designing the architecture of large manufacturing systems.

The ever-growing awareness of environmental protection has significantly influenced the method of manufacturing products. Due to the introduction of new processes, the management of sustainable manufacturing shows different characteristics to those of traditional systems. Sustainable manufacturing systems have attracted a great deal of attention in the past 20 years as an emerging manufacturing approach. Particularly in the last 10 years, the number of papers focusing on the topic of sustainable manufacturing systems’ management has increased rapidly. More and more practical factors have been considered and integrated into this area which makes it more complex, but closer to reality. This paper aims to classify the mathematical problems dealing with the management of sustainable manufacturing systems. More than 100 related papers mainly from 1994 to 2015 have been selected and reviewed and divided into three categories according to the main elements in a manufacturing system: production planning and contr...

Based on the phenomenal changes that additive manufacturing (AM) has brought to industries and markets, managerial approaches should be re-examined and developed to take advantage of emerging opportunities. This revolutionary technology is dramatically changing business and innovation models, shrinking supply chains and altering the global economy. For example, 3D printing shifts production locations closer to customers and leads to free-form product design as well as sustainable manufacturing. Several studies have been conducted on AM technology, but the research stream on AM management is still developing, with studies dispersed in journals across different research areas. Our study presents both systematic and quantitative analyses of the literature, including co-citation analysis, factor analysis and multidimensional scaling, to explore the structure of the AM research domains in the scope of management, business and economics. We found eight main research streams: AM technology selection, supply chai...

A method for the dynamic curation of manufacturing-related knowledge is proposed, based on the impact of successive paradigm introduction on the network structure within manufacturing companies. This draws together manufacturing system structure in terms of interacting component network types, the nature and consequences of knowledge silos and the underpinning dichotomous influence of language. The need and opportunities for an objective- rather than subjective paradigm-based view of manufacturing are identified, leading to a curation process in which paradigms and other knowledge specialisms are different viewpoints based on particular models of manufacturing processes and resources. The consequences of this are explored in terms of knowledge silo reduction, improved communication within component social- and information networks, increased operational resilience and better informed decision-making for future business.

Design for Manufacturing (DFM), especially the use of manufacturing knowledge to support design decisions, has received attention in the academic domain. However, industry practice has not been studied enough to provide solutions that are mature for industry. The current state of the art for DFM is often rule-based functionality within Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that enforce specific design requirements. That rule-based functionality may or may not dynamically affect geometry definition. And, if rule-based functionality exists in the CAD system, it is typically a customization on a case-by-case basis. Manufacturing knowledge is a phrase with vast meanings, which may include knowledge on the effects of material properties decisions, machine and process capabilities, or understanding the unintended consequences of design decisions on manufacturing. One of the DFM questions to answer is how can manufacturing knowledge, depending on its definition, be used earlier in the product lifecycle to enable a more collaborative development environment? This paper will discuss the results of a workshop on manufacturing knowledge that highlights several research questions needing more study. This paper proposes recommendations for investigating the relationship of manufacturing knowledge with shape, behavior, and context characteristics of product to produce a better understanding of what knowledge is most important. In addition, the proposal includes recommendations for investigating the system-level barriers to reusing manufacturing knowledge and how model-based manufacturing may ease the burden of knowledge sharing. Lastly, the proposal addresses the direction of future research for holistic solutions of using manufacturing knowledge earlier in the product lifecycle.

Recent research and development in production industry reveals a movement to cyber-physical production systems and Internet of things enabled manufacturing. In this context, ways in which enterprise processes are conceptualised and executed are changing. Decentralising production by applying interlinked cyber-physical production resources breaks up the traditional boundaries between different process abstraction layers. Heterogeneous smart devices and processes at all levels in the industrial control need to interact in such systems. In this paper, requirements from the field of Business Process Management towards the vertical integration of business and production processes are derived. With respect to the identified requirements the eligibility of the Subject-oriented Process Management (S-BPM) approach for vertical process integration is depicted. At the core, the paper investigates the applicability of S-BPM to achieve vertical process integration and reports lessons learnt from two industrial applica...

Rapid and cost-effective scalability of the throughput of manufacturing systems is an invaluable feature for the management of manufacturing enterprises. System design for scalability allows the enterprise to build a manufacturing system to supply the current demand, and upgrade its throughput in the future, in a cost-effective manner, to meet possible higher market demand in a timely manner. To possess this capability, the manufacturing system must be designed at the outset for future expansions in its throughput to enable growths in supply exactly when needed by the market. A mathematical method that maximises the system throughput after reconfiguration is proposed, and an industrial case is presented to validate the method. The paper offers a set of principles for system design for scalability to guide designers of modern manufacturing systems.

Mass customisation, increasing complexity and variety of new products as well as ongoing global competition force companies to use innovative manufacturing technologies. However, the way from a new and premature manufacturing technology towards its application in series production at the level of operational excellence is challenging. Recent examples in the automotive industry, such as alternative powertrains and new body concepts for lightweight design, have shown the necessity to integrate production research into the very early phase of product development – going far beyond established approaches of simultaneous engineering. This paper presents an optimisation method which enables companies to find the best point in time to start investing in a new premature manufacturing technology during product development. Therefore, a dynamic and stochastic model is used based on a Markovian decision process. Finally, the method is applied in an example of a manufacturing technology for the automotive industry.

Plastic injection mould manufacturing is diverse and complex. Traditional mould manufacturing planning often relied on experience and techniques. Therefore, in order not to affect the operation or even cause some loss of the enterprises, geometry information of computer-aided design (CAD) should be converted into manufacturing information of computer-aided process planning (CAPP) and CAM for automatic feature recognition to shorten the lead time. This study is the secondary development in a CAD environment creating a network plastic injection mould manufacturing navigating system and CAD/CAPP for integration and application. As part design is feature-based, each processing step can be regarded as a feature. By applying the hybrid recognition technology of the graph-based approach, the rule-based approach and hint-based approach in the analysis of part feature appearances, it can automatically categorise all the manufacturing features of the part and convert them into corresponding processes. The CAPP deve...

Manufacturing of aircraft structural parts has the characteristics of multiple varieties, complex structures and small batches, which make the manufacturing resource allocation highly difficult. This paper proposes a manufacturing resource allocation method with knowledge-based fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, considering multiple manufacturing resources including process planners, machine tools and cutting tools, as well as manufacturing process schemes of aircraft structural parts. Knowledge in terms of experts’ experience and historical data is used for fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. A manufacturing resource allocation model is proposed based on the analysis of manufacturing processes of aircraft structural parts. The capability of planners, the complexity of structural parts, the reliability of machine tools, the reliability of cutting tools and the correlations between manufacturing resources and structural parts are evaluated using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Multiple manufacturing re...

Flexibility has become one of the most useful and necessary tool in today’s competitive markets. Manufacturing flexibility is widely recognised as a critical component to achieving a competitive advantage in the market place. It is one of the most sought after properties for manufacturing enterprises and has aroused considerable interest among researchers and professionals. This paper presents a review of various issues related with manufacturing flexibility specifically concept, need, dimensions, measurement, relationship among various dimensions, implementation aspect in a company and management of manufacturing flexibility and its aim to contribute to the conceptual systemisation of the material.

The main objective of this research is to investigate the impact of manufacturing flexibility and technological dimensions of manufacturing strategy on responsiveness in the supply chain. Based on the theoretical background of dynamic capability, this study also examines the role of the business environment on the relationship between manufacturing flexibility and supply chain responsiveness. 144 structured surveys were collected and the partial least squares of structural equation modelling approach were utilised for data analysis. The result establishes relationships among various dimensions of manufacturing flexibility. Although the technological dimensions in manufacturing strategy of such advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) and e-procurement do not have any direct impact on new product and market flexibility, they increase supply chain responsiveness, which helps to react quickly against supply chain disruptions. More importantly, the business environment has a moderating effect on the relationship between market flexibility and supply chain responsiveness.

The application of group technology concepts to the design and operation of manufacturing cells has had a major impact on improving the performance of multiproduct, moderate volume manufacturing systems. Initially, the research on manufacturing cells focused primarily on methods for identifying rational part families and machine groups using only basic processing data. However, the comprehensiveness of the problem definition and the supporting decision models have evolved over time to include many relevant organisational issues and options. This paper reviews the developments in this area with particular emphasis on the leading contribution of the International Journal of Production Research. Based on those contributions, a more complete, general formulation for the design of manufacturing cells is presented.

This paper focuses on the need of the large equipment manufacturing industry to adapt collaborative operation to transform the industry to cloud manufacturing services and to solve the new problem of federal resources coordination in complete service operation. We systematically study federal resources cooperation under cloud manufacturing mode to complete a large complex project. The primary research contents are divided into four points. First, a system structure of cloud manufacturing service mode is presented. Second, a synergy logic framework from the global system perspective is designed based on generalised partial global planning. Third, a multi-level system coordination mechanism is established by integrating various methods, including the bidding game mechanism for enterprise external resources, the planning control mechanisms for enterprise internal resource and the global collaborative optimisation mechanism for enterprise global federal resources. Finally, a cloud manufacturing service platfo...

Process management and innovation arguably remain among the concepts under focus of recent researches since there is no significantly outstanding method to measure and monitor the level of innovation in the manufacturing processes over a particular time period taking the fundamental activities of manufacturing processes into account. Although there are various studies relevant to process improvement, manufacturing processes are not focused on in the literature. This paper presents a novel performance indicator, called degree of process innovation, for monitoring and measuring innovation in manufacturing processes based on the four most important components among the fundamental activities of a manufacturing system. The components are namely Average Labour Utilisation, Cumulative Bottleneck Ratio, Unit Production Time and Unit Production Cost. The idea behind this approach has flourished on the basis of an indicator proposed in the literature to measure the general organisational improvements. The scope of...

There are many types of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, ranging from very large and very functional vendor products such as those provided by SAP and Oracle, through in-house systems, and smaller vendor products. Thus, there is a substantial range of enterprise computing support available for manufacturing organisations and their manufacturing planning and control. The Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG) has collected a systematic survey of manufacturing organisations around the world, providing a picture of manufacturing operations. We have taken GMRG data and organised it around seven levels of ERP functionality, and analysed these data to determine effectiveness in terms of how ERP systems are used in global manufacturing firms, their role in accomplishing manufacturing planning and control, the relationship between ERP forms and data-management practices, the satisfaction firms have across ERP forms, and finally, relative perceived benefits and costs across ERP forms.

Design for sustainable manufacturing enterprise (DFSME) is considered to be a new ideologue regarding survival of manufacturing enterprise and it can also be considered as one of the most important solutions to deal with the existing global financial crisis. The DFSME is a systemic approach that simultaneously determines the aspects of sustainability and how they can be aggregated taking into consideration the globalisation issues. The problem addressed in this paper is how to present the concepts of sustainability to guide manufacturing enterprises analysts and designers with the most effective aspects for analysing sustainability. These aspects are: international issues; contemporary issues; innovative products; reconfigurable manufacturing systems; manufacturing strategies; business models; flexible organisation management; manufacturing strategies and performance measurements. Based on these aspects, the sustainable model will be analysed and presented through covering all aspects of sustainable manuf...

Article published in International Journal of Production Research, 2012. Also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2011.648777

This paper presents a computational environment as a tool for supporting the implementation of control coding of an automated manufacturing system. The proposed environment considers a cyclic three-stage control development – modelling, synthesis and implementation – until the real system accomplishes the required specification, resulting in the automated and integrated manufacturing system. The research details the three stages and describes the steps executed for each one. The mathematical formalism used in this work is also presented, as a basis for control implementation. The implementation environment is proposed in order to validate the control structure of this formalism and to allow a progressive integration of control hardware and software. To submit to a test and validate the proposal environment, two experiments are performed, in two different manufacturing systems. Thus, it is demanded that the control system can be reconfigurable in a fast and reliable way.

Researchers have stressed that manufacturing system flexibility research requires a quantitative model allowing a manufacturing system to prioritize its flexibility dimension and promote the performance of the manufacturing system. A quantification model presented in the present research is demonstrated to assess the degree of environmental uncertainty and illustrates a method for delivering the requirement of flexibility improvement for the manufacturing system so that the company is able to prioritize the types of manufacturing flexibility which a manufacturing system requires in an uncertain environment. Quantitative approaches including quality function deployment (QFD), analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and grey relational analysis (GRA) have been employed to find a means for improving the flexibility of a manufacturing system to cope with environmental uncertainty. QFD is the focal approach for the deployment of the integrated structure of the research. AHP is applied to explore the relative weigh...

To cope with today's industrial demands requiring (1) coverage of the whole product life cycle, (2) environmentally conscious manufacturing, (3) competitive sustainability manufacturing, etc., a new manufacturing paradigm should be developed. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for a new paradigm called ubiquitous factory (u-Factory) by applying ubiquitous computing technology to the manufacturing system. The u-Factory is based on our previously developed paradigm, called UbiDMR [1], meaning product design, manufacturing, and recycling via ubiquitous computing technology. The essence of u-Factory can be represented by three key phrases: (1) information transparency, (2) autonomous control, and (3) sustainable manufacturing. This paper comprises two parts. In the first part, we show the derivation procedure for the framework of the u-Factory using problem analysis of the current manufacturing system, design consideration and derivation of the architecture for the ubiquitous factory. In the sec...

The use of service-orientation principles in manufacturing systems is a promising solution to achieve modularity, flexibility, re-configurability and interoperability. Crucial issues in these service-oriented systems are the description and co-ordination of the execution of the services offered by the distributed entities. This paper introduces an integrated approach for the design, analysis, validation, simulation and process execution of service-oriented manufacturing systems, using the High-level Petri net formalism as the formal language to describe the system behaviour. The use of the proposed approach contributes to achieving an easier and faster development of these solutions and provides the basis to support modularity and re-configurability.

Manufacturing systems continue to adapt in order to survive the changing and challenging markets and global competition. Product and manufacturing design and capabilities are configured to allow the needed adaptation through innovative design, improved system paradigms, intelligent design and optimisation models, and product grouping to increase efficiency. In this research, it is hypothesised that the evolution and co-evolution of products and the machines used to manufacture them is akin to that observed in the adaptation of biological species. The symbiosis between products and manufacturing capabilities is studied using real examples, and a new model that establishes the symbiotic relationship between their evolution paths and observed co-evolution trends based on available historical information is proposed. Dual cladograms are used to track their evolution and detect useful potential development and plausible future evolution trends. When a state of co-evolution equilibrium is reached, a stimulus fo...

This paper presents a production control approach for the testing and rework cell in a dynamic and stochastic computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system. The proposed situation dependent decision selector (SDDS) observes the status of the system and jobs at every decision point, and makes its three different decisions on dispatching, pre-emption, and dispatching within pre-emption in real time. This paper also develops a new feature selection algorithm for the SDDS. Experimental results show that the SDDS is better than other static control rules and another dynamic control approach with respect to the number of tardy jobs.

Object-oriented technology has been widely acclaimed as offering a revolution in computing that is resolving a myriad of problems inherent in developing and managing organisational information processing capabilities. Although its foundations arose in computer programming languages, object-oriented technology has implications for a wide range of business computing activities including: programming, analysis and design, information management, and information sharing. The problematic issues in the development of manufacturing software systems are related to the various characteristics of manufacturing systems, which are wide, dynamic and complex. Design for manufacturing (DFM) is the integrated practice of designing components while considering their manufacturability, and its benefits are widely acknowledged in the industry. A model has been developed using object oriented technology, after analysing the fundamental elements necessary for modelling manufacturing and process planning framework used in coll...

Global aerospace manufacturing has resulted in a direct need for the development of new manufacturing techniques and machines. These emerging technologies require a specific approach to technology, supplier and enterprise communication development. However, a global strategy for aerospace supply-chains is difficult to develop, specifically for new manufacturing technologies. Within large aerospace companies, it is challenging to assess emerging technologies with respect to manufacturing readiness level and risk. The research provided discusses a technique used to assess risk coupled with manufacturing readiness level maturation for emerging technologies using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Developing customer requirements for a new manufacturing technology is challenging when multiple customers exist for the proposed technology. Technology experts are found within the company and executive champions are solicited to assist in sponsoring the emerging technology. This research covers proven heur...

Earlier studies indicated that using multiple dispatching rules (MDRs) for the various zones in the system can enhance the production performance to a greater extent than using a single dispatching rule (SDR) over a given scheduling interval for all the machines in the system, since MDRs employ the multi-pass simulation approach for real-time scheduling (RTS). However, if a classical machine learning approach is used, an RTS knowledge base (KB) can be developed by using the appropriate MDRs strategy (this method is called an intelligent multi-controller in this paper) as obtained from training examples. The main disadvantage of using MDRs is that the classes (scheduling decision variables) to which training examples are assigned must be provided. Hence, developing an RTS KB using the intelligent multi-controller approach becomes an intolerably time-consuming task because MDRs for the next scheduling period must be determined. To address this issue, we proposed an intelligent multi-controller incorporating...

[EN] The manufacturing field is an area where the application of simulation is an essential tool for validating methods and architectures before applying them on the factory floor and the warehouse control. Multiagent system technology has demonstrated its utility in manufacturing system modelling and implementation. Agenthood features such as proactivity, reactivity, sociability and trust may also be useful for associating them with the specific simulation needs of the new manufacturing and warehouse management requirements. In this article, we present an agent-supported simulation tool for an intelligent manufacturing system and its influence with the management of the warehouse applied to a metal-mechanic manufacturing enterprise. The main goal is to provide a flexible simulation tool that can be adapted to solve the new manufacturing requirements and optimise and validate methods of management of material in warehouses that appear in real environments. Thus, the benefits of the multiagent theory application for the simulation of intelligent manufacturing and warehouse management system allows the experts of manufacturing domains to optimise the resource usage, control of inventory, providers and to have enough data to make decisions that influence the production level are presented. © 2011 Taylor & Francis., The authors would like to thank the financial support received from the Spanish government and FEDER funds under CICYT TIN2006-14630-C03-01 and TIN2005-03395 projects is gratefully acknowledged. This project is also partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are particularly adapted to deal with dynamic distributed environments and are typically used to manage business workflows or data flows in manufacturing systems. From a control perspective, holonic representation allows both the informational and the physical parts in such manufacturing systems to be modelled. In this article, we focus on the notion of role in holonic MAS (HoloMAS) and its contribution to the adaptive control of manufacturing systems. We validated our HoloMAS proposal using simulations and through a real implementation on a flexible assembly cell in our university lab. Our results clearly show that the notion of role helps to adapt and manage perturbations.

Nowadays manufacturing companies are forced to have manufacturing systems that can support agile responses to the emergence of changing conditions. As biological organisms are quite capable of adapting to environmental changes and stimulus, bio-inspired concepts have been recognised as very suitable for adaptive manufacturing system control. In a biological body, the neuroendocrine system plays an important role in controlling and modulating the adaptive behaviour of biological organisms using neuro-control and hormone-regulation principles. This paper, therefore, proposes the novel concept of NeuroEndocrine-Inspired Manufacturing System (NEIMS). The proposed NEIMS control architecture is inherited from neuro-control and hormone-regulation principles to agilely deal with the frequent occurrence of unexpected disturbances at the shop floor level. From the cybernetics point of view, the control model of NEIMS is described in detail, and a test bed has been set up to enable the NEIMS simulation.

Process planning and scheduling are important manufacturing planning activities which deal with resource utilisation and time span of manufacturing operations. The process plans and the schedules generated in the planning phase will be modified in the execution phase due to the unforeseen disturbances in the manufacturing systems. This paper deals with a multi-agent architecture of an integrated and dynamic system for process planning and scheduling for multiple jobs. A negotiation protocol is discussed, in this paper, to generate the process plans and the schedules of the manufacturing resources and the individual jobs, dynamically and incrementally, based on the alternative manufacturing processes. The alternative manufacturing processes are presented by the process plan networks discussed in the previous paper [Tehrani et al. 2007. A search algorithm for generating alternative process plans in flexible manufacturing system. Journal of Advanced Mechanical Design, System, and Manufacturing, 1 (5), 706–71...

Manufacturing systems are dynamic, non-linear and often chaotic environments, subjected to the occurrence of unexpected disturbances that provokes deviations from the initial plans and degrades the system’s performance. Traditionally, disturbance management is performance in a centralized manner, using a fail-fix approach and considering only one type of disturbance, the machine failure. However, the new generation of intelligent manufacturing systems should be capable to treat emergency as earlier as possible and in an effective way, to minimize its negative impact in the production performance. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a holonic disturbance management architecture based on the ADACOR foundations. The disturbance handling functions are performed in a distributed manner, introducing a predictive dimension to the re-scheduling problem and considering the major types of shop floor disturbances. An experimental implementation was performed and the obtained results showed the applicability of the proposed approach.

In modern industry, mass production has migrated to third world countries. To be competitive, European companies are forced to rapidly switch towards manufacturing of short series of customised products with added value. In European industry, a great effort has been made in order to customise products and give them an added value by developing new fabrication technologies. Additive layered manufacturing (ALM), also known as rapid manufacturing (RM), is a powerful tool that offers the necessary competitiveness to European companies. ALM comprises the use of layer-by-layer manufacturing in order to build a part by addition of material. Fabrication is performed directly from the 3D CAD model, which is sliced into layers that are printed one upon the other. Also known as free form fabrication, additive fabrication ‘unlocks’ design potential since part design obeys functionality, pushing the limits of manufacturability. In this paper, the authors review ALM technologies and the state-of-the-art of ALM applicat...

This paper deals with controlling flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) operating in volatile production environments. Shnits et al. (Shnits, B., Rubinovitz, J., and Sinreich, D., 2004. Multicriteria dynamic scheduling methodology for controlling a flexible manufacturing system. International Journal of Production Research, 42 (17), 3457–3472.) and Shnits and Sinreich (Shnits, B. and Sinreich, D., 2006. Controlling flexible manufacturing systems based on a dynamic selection of an appropriate operational criteria and scheduling policy. International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, 18 (1), 1–27.) developed a multi-criteria dynamic scheduling mechanism for controlling an FMS that can cope with such environments. An important part of this mechanism functioning, which impinges directly on its performance, is the activation of its decision-making process. This study continues the research presented in the above-mentioned papers and proposes different triggering methods for activating the control syste...

This paper deals with a production control problem for the testing and rework cell in a dynamic and stochastic computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system. This research first defines dispatching within pre-emption for an extended form of pre-emption. A dynamic controller called competitive decision selector (CDS) is then modified and extended as CDSplus to handle three different production control decisions; dispatching, pre-emption, and dispatching within pre-emption. It observes the status of the system and jobs at every decision point, and makes its three different decisions in real time. The CDSplus dynamic control shows better performance than static control rules with respect to the number of tardy jobs.

The integrated charge planning (ICP) problem based on flexible jobs in an integrated steel plant is extremely difficult and valuable. The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency and feasibility of planning by minimising the number of charges, minimising the total production costs and maximising the total throughput, considering the hard constraints and soft constraints. A multi-objective mathematical programming model for the problem is formulated, and it is shown that the problem is NP-hard. Two new meta-heuristics are designed, one is guided variable neighbourhood search (GVNS) combined with harmony search, and the other is GVNS combined with simulated annealing. Compared with enumeration algorithm, tabu search, variable neighbourhood search (VNS), harmony search, extend next fit decreasing (ENFD) and skewed VNS (SVNS), variable neighbourhood descent (VND), the numerical results by actual production data have shown that the proposed model and GVNHS are feasible and effective for ICP.

One-of-a-kind production is a new manufacturing paradigm for producing customised products based on the requirements of individual customers while maintaining the quality and efficiency of mass production. This research addresses the issues in optimal concurrent product design and process planning based on the requirements of individual customers. In this work, a hybrid AND-OR graph is developed to model the variations of design configurations/parameters and manufacturing processes/parameters in a generic product family. Since different design configurations and parameters can be created from the same customer requirements, and each design can be further achieved through alternative manufacturing processes and parameters, co-evolutionary genetic programming and numerical optimisation are employed to identify the optimal product design configuration/parameters and manufacturing process/parameters. A case study is introduced to identify the optimal design configuration/parameters and manufacturing process/p...

The capture of manufacturing best practice knowledge in product lifecycle management systems has significant potential to improve the quality of design decisions and minimise manufacturing problems during new product development. However, providing a reusable source of manufacturing best practice is difficult due to the complexity of the viewpoint relationships between products and the manufacturing processes and resources used to produce them. This paper discusses how best to organise manufacturing best practice knowledge, the relationships between elements of this knowledge plus their relationship to product information. The paper also explores the application of UML-2 as a system design tool which can model these relationships and hence support the reuse of system design models over time. The paper identifies a set of part family and feature libraries and, most significantly, the relationships between them, as a means of capturing best practice manufacturing knowledge and illustrates how these can be linked to manufacturing resource models and product information. Design for manufacture and machining best practice views are used in the paper to illustrate the concepts developed. An experimental knowledge based system has been developed and results generated using a power transmission shaft example.

To build up a manufacturing management model for a newly developed product is fundamentally a difficult problem, because the collected data in the early manufacturing stages is usually insufficient when data size is small. There are several researches on this topic, and most of them focus on the original data analysis such as building up virtual samples to increase the data number. As to other approaches, the usage of old or similar manufacturing experience may be an alternative approach to help in modelling a small data set, by taking advantage of the fact that the new product's manufacturing process could be based on the experience of the old one. This research proposes a combination of support vector regression (SVR) and the manufacturing experience to build up the manufacturing knowledge model for a new product. A real-problem of a new product yield forecast model in a polariser manufacturing company is demonstrated, where two approaches are proposed, and the results show that the presented approach i...

Manufacturing strategy is a plan for moving a company from where it is to where it wants to be. Determining the best manufacturing strategy is not easy because of the wide range of choices and constraints a company faces. Manufacturing strategy frameworks or models are helpful because they identify the objects that comprise manufacturing strategy and organise these objects into a structure that enables a company to understand and use the objects to develop strategy. This paper examines a company's international manufacturing network. It identifies and examines six manufacturing strategy objects (generic international strategies, manufacturing networks, network manufacturing outputs, network levers, network capability, and factory types), linkages between objects, and the manufacturing strategy framework that follows from these objects and linkages. Then the paper applies the framework to the manufacturing networks of three companies in the global steel industry: Arcelor (Luxembourg), Mittal (India), and D...

This paper presents a graph-based model to measure the relative manufacturing complexity of and the manufacturing similarity of products in job shop manufacturing systems. This model depicts the impact of the complexity factors on the profit realisable from products based on their manufacturing process and required resources/skills. These resources deal with the process required for a component to reach assembly, the process of assembling the components to a whole product. This relative manufacturing complexity measure not only can support assembly and production cost estimation, but also can provide a guideline for creating a product with the most effective balance of manufacturing and assembly. Also, the results of this study can help improve budgeting and resource allocation, and the product life cycle cost estimation for future products. A numerical example is also presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach.

As supply chains are becoming ever more global and agile in the modern manufacturing era, enterprises are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective discovery of shared manufacturing resources provided by their partners, wherever they are. Enterprises are thus faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in manufacturing interoperability and integration over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents a prototype intelligent system SWMRD (Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery) for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. Ontology-based annotation to the distributed manufacturing resources via a new, multidisciplinary manufacturing ontology is proposed on the semantic web to convert resources into machine understandable knowledge, which is a prelude to the meaningful resource discovery for cross-enterprise multidisciplinary collaboration. An ontology-based multi-level knowledge retrie...

The problem addressed by this research is to implement lean manufacturing in a material handling system of a petroleum drill bit manufacturing company. Lean manufacturing has been mandated by higher level management as a tool to be used in waste reduction. Operational group must define the objectives of lean manufacturing and deploy the tools to specific work cells. A methodology that provides operational group with a tool to assist in defining the objectives of lean manufacturing is developed. A case study is used to demonstrate the lean implementation in material handling operations.

International audience; The paper presents a method for the analysis and design of industrial production systems based on a joint assessment of the cost and the quality of service. The operation of a production system is seen as the accomplishment of a sequence of missions, each one corresponding to the cost-effective production and delivery of a specified quantity of products within a specified time frame. The paper shows that the probability of successfully accomplishing a mission is a non linear function of the cumulative production downtime and that this time can not be obtained using conventional Markov based techniques. The paper also introduces an analytical model and a procedure that allows the density function of the downtime to be obtained and shows how, using these tools, the production costs and the quality of service may be assessed and related to the internal design of the shop floor. The method seems to be particularly valuable in the analysis of production systems integrated in just-in-time supply chains, in which the reliability of the deliveries is an outstanding requirement.