Determining the production capacity of flexible manufacturing systems is a very important issue in the design of such systems. We propose an approach for determining the production capacity (i.e., the maximum production rate) of a flexible manufacturing system with several part types, dedicated pallets, and fixed production ratios among the different part types. We show that the problem reduces...

Due to the complexity of scheduling flexible manufacturing systems, the generation of production schedules requires an intelligent technique. Many artificial intelligence techniques such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and neural networks have been successfully applied to the scheduling of advanced manufacturing systems. One such system is Robotic Flexible Assembly Cells (RFACs). Few studies...

-. The goal of this paper is to show and justify the reasons to develop a new part coding systems that includes a more complete characterization of the parts. This new coding system not only could be used in common applications, also in computing process planning tasks. Particularly, this paper shows a possible application related with the conceptual design of Flexible Manufacturing Systems and...

Flexible n-type tungsten carbide/polylactic acid (WC/PLA) composites were fabricated by additive manufacturing and their thermoelectric properties were investigated. The preparation of an n-type polymer-based thermoelectric composite with good stability in air atmosphere via additive manufacturing holds promise for application in flexible thermoelectric devices. For WC/PLA volume ratios varying...

The paper presents a model of designing of machine layout in flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Evolutionary computation, particularly genetic algorithms (GAs) proved to be successful in search of optimal solution for this type of problems. To achieve high productivity in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS), an efficient layout arrangement and material flow path design are important due to ...

Knowledge based or Intelligent Control of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) means a continuous or frequent observation and evaluation of the status and condition of the system performance, decision making based on the evaluation results and on pre-defined knowledge, and then the operation according to the decisions. This kind of process is applied if any kind of disturbance or irregularity h...

The increased use of flexible manufacturing systems to efficiently provide customers with diversified products has created a significant set of operational challenges for managers. Many issues concerning procedures and policies for the day-to-day operation of these systems are still unresolved. Previous studies in this area have concentrated on various problems by isolating or simplifying the s...

A flexible manufacturing system is a high automated GT machine cell, consisting of a group of processing workstations (usually CNC machine tools), interconnected by an automated material handling and storage system, and controlled by a distributed computer system. The reason the FMS is called flexible is that it is capable of processing a variety of diffrent part styles simultaneously at the va...

Flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) often operate with increasing failure rate due to extensive utilization and wear-outs of equipment. While maintenance plans can eliminate wear-out failures, random failures are still unavoidable. This paper discusses a procedure that combines simulation and analytical models to analyze the effects of corrective, preventive, and opportunistic maintenance polic...

Symmetric mathematical programming is used to analyze the optimality of balancing workloads t~ maximize the expected production in a single-serve~closed queuing network model of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). In particular, using generalized concavity we prove that, even though the production function is not concave, balancing workloads maximizes the expected production in certain types...