Sequencing and scheduling are forms of decision making which play a key role in manufacturing. This paper presents the description of a scheduling algorithm for the solution of the no-wait ̄ow-shop problem. The goal of the heuristic is to minimise the sum of the total ̄owtimes, a criterion which at the same time minimises the average processing time. This is a sensible target in applications su...

Nowadays, manufacturing systems are complex and often chaotic environments, being collated with customer satisfaction, products shorter life cycle and new e-business trends, becoming the design of manufacturing control applications a complex and hard task. As the traditional control approaches present serious problems to handle simultaneously the distribution of functions, global production opt...

One of the most important changes in the technological and economic environment of industrial firms is the increasing diffusion and strongly increasing commercial use of Internet technologies in manufacturing. Both formal and empirical studies verified the significant increase in productivity through intraorganizational applications of modern information and communication technologies in manufa...

Autonomous distributed manufacturing systems(ADMS) consist of multiple intelligent components with each component acting according to its own judgments. The ADMS objective is to realize more agile and adaptive manufacturing systems. This paper presents the introduction of context-dependent agents (CDAs) in ADMS that switch strategies depending on system conditions to achieve better performance ...

Information systems are identified as enablers of agile manufacturing. Despite the continuous utilisation of IT/IS applications, there is growing evidence that information technology/systems do not deliver their expected benefits. In this work we investigated three main issues related to information systems: competitive bases-general goals, development and infrastructure. We tested our approach...

Lean production is regarded by many as simply an enhancement of mass production methods, whereas agility implies breaking out of the mass-production mould and producing much more highly customized products—where the customer wants them in any quantity. In a product line context, it amounts to striving for economies of scope, rather than economies of scale ideally serving ever-smaller niche mark...

A number of current manufacturing sectors are striving hard to introduce innovative long-term strategies into their operations. As a result, many scholarly studies have found it fruitful to investigate advanced manufacturing strategies such as agile, computer-integrated, and cellular manufacturing. Through the example of downstream cases, manufacturing sectors have learned that financial benefi...