Manufacturing Architecture Design Using Discrete Material Flow Management

The main problem treated in this paper is that if we want to optimize a network of manufacturing systems design using discrete material flow management we need a new algorithm different from the one used for a single manufacturing system. For a single manufacturing system we usually use discrete material flow simulation to identify and eliminate bottlenecks where the flow is slowed down or blocked in order to increase the productivity. For a network of manufacturing systems material flow concentrators could be the bottlenecks found in one of the manufacturing systems using this classical discrete material flow simulation but it also could be a new different one. We focus in this paper on the algorithm we propose to solve this problem of identifying and eliminating not the bottlenecks of each manufacturing system but of the entire network. A case study of multipolar synchronous simulation (as we named our proposed algorithm) is presented in order to illustrate across a tree nodes manufacturing network how this new algorithm works. (Received in April 2009, accepted in June 2009. This paper was with the authors 1 month for 1 revision.)