A Push-Pop Cell Simulation System for e-Manufacturing

This research will analyze and discuss the inner behavior of a flexible manufacturing cell in order to buildup its object-oriented simulation system. An object-oriented Petri Net will be built to model a flexible manufacturing cell. The objects of the object-oriented Petri Net are directly mapped from physical objects of a flexible manufacturing cell. This cell includes a robot, several machines and a WIP buffer. The job enters the cell once the job volume is under capacity limit. Therefore a dynamic scheduling system is required to schedule operations for jobs in the cell. Several common scheduling algorithms will be developed for the scheduling system. A database containing e-manufacturing information is built and a simulation tool-eM-Plant will be utilized to build the simulation system for our model.