Cellular manufacturing is a promising approach for grouping eeciency in manufacturing systems. Although this problem has been extensively studied in the literature, very few authors have proposed exact methods. The basic cellular manufacturing problem consists in deening cells which lead to the minimum number of bottleneck elements. In this paper, we consider a new formulation of the cellular m...

In order to shorten production time, it is wise to use simulation tools at every step of product development. Simulation tools can help avoid iterative steps based on trials and minimize development time—as well as costs. Along with existing WZL software packages (Refs. 1–2), a software simulation tool for gear hobbing has been in development for several years—i.e., PARTApro. Gear hobbing is on...

The rapid advances in information technology are causing a fundamental change in the way we do our business. Within OUI manufacturing businesses today, various parts of the organization are “reasoning” about “engineered products.” The everyday problem-solving activity within the organization can be thought of as conducted by a network of experts knowledgeable about the products and the physical...

Shortening product lifecycles and small lot sizes require manufacturing systems to adapt increasingly fast. Many existing machine tools, handling and logistics systems provide a generic functionality that is not bound to a specific product. But this flexibility and reconfigurability on the level of individual resources is lost in automated systems that are limited to the production of a fixed s...

This paper discusses the body of knowledge known as complex systems theory and its relevance to manufacturing organizations. It begins by addressing the development of systems thinking, in order to explore the different views on how systems should be studied. This initial commentary provides an introduction to the concepts of the complex systems theory approach, along with its various metaphors...

Agent based modeling and simulation consider the behavior of agents acting in a system. The agents' interactions result in changing the agent’s behavior, the whole agent based system, and its environment. In this study, the manufacturing, sale, and receiving orders behaviors pertinent to manufacturing and sale agents acting across a pharmaceutical supply chain of an Iranian manufacturing medici...

This paper presents MEDIATOR, a feature recognition system which is designed to be maintainable and ex-tensible to families of related manufacturing processes. A problem in many feature recognition systems is that they are diicult to maintain. One of the reasons may be because they depend on use of a library of feature-types which are diicult to update when the manufacturing processes change du...

Next Generation Manufacturing Systems (NGMS) will support the Next Generation Manufacturing Enterprises (NGMEs). Adaptive distributed manufacturing systems seem to be a promising solution for NGMEs to provide increased levels of flexibility, reconfigurability and intelligence to respond to the highly dynamic market demands. Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are expected to be the dominant manufacturing...

In the ®eld of manufacturing, there is a need to develop large-scale manufacturing information systems. This is especially true in the Japanese steel manufacturing industry where CIM is the core management technology. But developing such systems requires large amounts of time and manpower, and furthermore, these type of projects are very dif®cult to manage. Therefore, in order to ease the proce...

Traditionally, manufacturing facilities and building services are analysed separately to manufacturing operations. This is despite manufacturing operations using and discarding energy with the support of facilities. Therefore improvements in energy and other resource use to work towards sustainable manufacturing have been sub-optimal. This paper presents research in which buildings, facilities ...