The time for electronically connecting business and manufacturing has come. Advancements in e-commerce have requested that business decisions on web be the direct driving info to the corresponding manufacturing activities without human interventions. Since orders from the web may arrive in random sequence and with a range of specifications, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) may be the proper...

Ù This work was supported by Sandia Corporation under Contract No. DE-AC04-94-AL85000 with the U.S. Department of Energy. Abstract A CORBA-based distributed object software system was developed for Sandia’s Agile Manufacturing Testbed (SAMT). This information architecture supports the goals of agile manufacturing: rapid response to changing requirements; reduction in both time and cost of the p...

Smart manufacturing is defined by high degrees of automation. Automation, in turn, is defined by clearly defined processes. The use of standards in this environment is not just commonplace, but essential to creating repeatable processes and reliable systems. As with the rest of society, manufacturing systems are becoming more tightly connected through advances in information and communication t...

For mass production of structural composites, use of different textile patterns, custom preforming, room temperature cure high performance polymers and simplistic manufacturing approaches are desired. Woven fabrics are widely used for infusion processes owing to their high permeability but their localised mechanical performance is affected due to inherent associated crimps. The current investig...

One of the projects in the Machine Learning Department a t GTE Laboratories involves studying quality control of a fluorescent bulb manufacturing line. All manufacturing processes are subject to incompletely understood changes due t o variations in raw materials, environmental factors such as weather, wearing and aging of the machinery, and changes in operators. This can result in iiiarked vari...

This paper wants to present an integrated approach to Line Balancing and Risk Assessment and a Software Tool named ErgoAnalysis that makes it easy to control the whole production process and produces a Risk Index for the actual work tasks in an Assembly Line. Assembly Line Balancing, or simply Line Balancing, is the problem of assigning operations to workstations along an assembly line, in such...

dynamic cellular manufacturing systems,   mixed-integer non-linear programming,   production planning, manufacturing attributes   this paper presents a novel mixed-integer non-linear programming model for the design of a dynamic cellular manufacturing system (dcms) based on production planning (pp) decisions and several manufacturing attributes. such an integrated dcms model with an extensive c...

The objective in traditional scheduling is usually time based. Minimizing the makespan, total flow times, total tardi costs, etc. are instances of these objectives. In manufacturing, processing each job entails a cost paying and price receiving. Thus, the objective should include some notion of managing the flow of cash. We have defined two new objectives: maximization of average and minimum av...

In this paper we are to present a practical application of Axiomatic Design (AD) methodology, as a roadmap to lean production, in redesigning a car body assembly line. Axiomatic Design theory provides a framework to simplify the whole problem. According to the AD principles, a hierarchical structure has been developed. The developed structure originated in lean manufacturing principles and exis...