Design of product oriented manufacturing systems

A Product Oriented Manufacturing System is designed for the manufacture of a product or a family of similar products. POM may be seen as a development of traditional Cellular Manufacturing and tends to involve more than one cell. A POMS may either be physically organized in a single place or be made of distributed manufacturing or servicing units, thus comprising a virtual system. To be efficient, the POMS design should identify design phases and point to the data, methods and tools that should be used to obtain good design solutions. In this paper, one such methodology is proposed, together with an analysis of the conceptual configuration of the cells that are the building blocks of POM systems.