This paper describes a novel method of calculating the sensitivity of the manufacturing system throughput to the variables of the machines. The sensitivity analysis needs only a single simulation, yet is easy to use and provides accurate results. This sensitivity analysis is then used to predict the change in the system throughput due to a change of the variables of the machines provided that t...

In this paper, we consider distributed versions of a modified shifting bottleneck heuristic for complex job shops. The considered job shop environment contains parallel batching machines, machines with sequence-dependent setup times and reentrant process flows. Semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities are typical examples for manufacturing systems with these characteristics. The used performa...

In this paper, we describe adaptation techniques for a hierarchically organized multi-agent-system (MAS) applied to production control of complex job shops. The system architecture of the production control system is based on three different control layers. The mid layer implements a distributed shifting bottleneck type solution procedure. The shifting bottleneck heuristic decomposes the overal...

Knowing the bottleneck is one of the keys to improving a production system. The active period method is one approach to detect shifting bottlenecks that most other bottleneck detection methods have problems with. Yet, like many other methods, these detections are limited to detecting the past and present bottlenecks. In this paper, we combined the active period method with the buffer Preprint o...

The advent of cDNA and oligonucleotide microarray technologies has led to a paradigm shift in biological investigation, such that the bottleneck in research is shifting from data generation to data analysis. Hierarchical clustering, divisive clustering, self-organizing maps and k-means clustering have all been recently used to make sense of this mass of data.

A lossless data hiding method based on histogram shifting is proposed, which employs a scheme of adaptive division of cover images into blocks to yield large data hiding capacities as well as high stego-image qualities. The method is shown to break a bottleneck of data-hiding-rate increasing at the image block size of 8 × 8, which is found in existing histogram-shifting methods. Four ways of bl...