There has recently been an increased emphasis on reducing energy consumption in manufacturing, driven by the fluctuations in energy costs and the growing importance given to environmental impact of manufactured goods. Lots of attention has been given to the reduction of machine tools energy consumption, as they require large amounts of energy to perform manufacturing tasks. One area that has re...

This paper presents the techniques of tool path planning and an activity-based manufacturing cost analysis for the simultaneous turn-mill machining. The new turn-mill machine tools allow the parallel processing of both multi-axis milling and turning operations simultaneously. Turn-mill machine tools have been identified to be able to significantly reduce the total setup time and manufacturing c...

A heated debate continues over the need for trade-offs in operations strategy. Some researchers call for plants to focus on a single manufacturing capability and devote their limited resources accordingly, while others claim that advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) enables concurrent improvements in quality, cost, flexibility, and delivery. Yet there is little empirical evidence for or agai...

Developing a simulation model can be a time consuming process. Often multiple simulation models are built to simulate similar systems with small differences. The Housing Constructability Lab at the University of Central Florida has developed numerous models of modular housing manufacturing operations, both existing and planned. While the physical configurations differed considerably, the underl...

A flowline-based manufacturing system is a manufacturing environment where machines are arranged in accordance with the order of processing of jobs, with all jobs having an identical and unidirectional flow pattern through the machines; however, some or all jobs may have missing operations on some machines. In several practical situations the setup times of jobs are separable, significant and s...

Today’s manufacturing plants are equipped with heterogeneous software systems for different types of tasks, both manufacturing operations and factory planning. On the operating level software systems are neither yet integrated and thus support separate tasks such as production monitoring, sequence planning, work piece identification, maintenance order management, worker information and others. ...

Observation is a key aspect within a Lean improvement project. The project team starts from scratch and analyses the current situation by walking through the production process. During the last decade, the digitization of manufacturing operations has had its share of attention. Different kinds of software tools collect and analyze real-time data and turn them into valuable knowledge to support ...

This paper examines how a focused factory adapts to a change in its manufacturing mission. We use the organizational nature of production operations to suggest that the effectiveness of adaptation will depend on how well the manufacturing requirements of the new mission match manufacturing capabilities at the production line level. We test our hypotheses using primary data from a well-known foc...

The paper highlights the problem of mathematical modelling of the serial logistic manufacturing system in which each work stand performs autonomously independent number of operations in sequence on the order vector elements. It is assumed that machines in each work stand are identical and equipped with the same set of various tools which can be arranged optionally to carry required operations o...

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing involves multiple process steps that can be challenging to model. Oftentimes, operating conditions are studied in bench-scale experiments and then fixed to specific values during full-scale operations. This procedure limits the opportunity to tune process variables to correct for the effects of disturbances. Generating process models has the potential to increase...