A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility to react in the case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility can be divided into two categories: ١. Machine flexibility, covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part, and ٢....

This paper evaluates the tardiness performance of a complex dynamic manufacturing environment. These sampling-based adaptive heuristic in a dynamic manufacturing­ 'changes' include machine breakdowns, unavailability of environment. A test bed, following a real world manufacturing material and other resources to perform manufacturing system, has been developed. The proposed algorithm has been op...

Recent advances in medical robotics have initiated a transition from rigid serial manipulators to flexible or continuum robots capable of navigating to confined anatomy within the body. A desire for further procedure minimization is a key accelerator for the development of these flexible systems where the end goal is to provide access to previously inaccessible anatomical workspaces and enable ...

Recent advances in medical robotics have initiated a transition from rigid serial manipulators to flexible or continuum robots capable of navigating to confined anatomy within the body. A desire for further procedure minimization is a key accelerator for the development of these flexible systems where the end goal is to provide access to the previously inaccessible anatomical workspaces and ena...

The traditional manufacturing system research literature generally assumed that there was only one feasible process plan for each job. This implied that there was no flexibility considered in the process plan. But, in the modern manufacturing system, most jobs may have a large number of flexible process plans. So, flexible process plans selection in a manufacturing environment has become a cruc...

The ceramic tile industry has evolved greatly in the recent years to the almost complete automation of the production line. After a decade of improvements in the manufacture, today’s plants are capable of mass produce tiles with little human intervention. However, the planning and scheduling of the orders has not changed much and scheduling the client’s orders in the shop remains as a manually ...

In this study, mathematical models are developed to study and compare the operations of a fully reliable and an unreliable flexible manufacturing cell (FMC), each with a flexible machine, a loading/unloading robot, and a pallet handling system. The operation times, loading/unloading times, and material handling times by the pallet are assumed to be random. The operation of the reliable cell is ...

The actual need for rising the productivity and flexibility of the manufacturing systems requires the use of new technologies and methodologies. Particularly, Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) are the field where better results can be obtained. FMC are highly adaptable to changes in the market and in the product, due to their flexibility. This flexibility only is possible if we use programmabl...

In this paper, we study the effect of batch sizes on performance of flexible manufacturing cells, where performance is evaluated in terms of flow-related measures such as part flow times, work-in-process levels, machine utilizations, and production rates. We introduce new analytical models that account for material handling, both discrete and continuous, and differentiate between process and tr...

Most visual quality inspections in discrete manufacturing are composed of length, surface, angle or intensity measurements. Those are implemented as end-user configurable inspection tools that should not require an image processing expert to set up. Currently available software solutions providing such capability use a flowchart based programming environment, but do not fully address an inspect...