In today’s manufacturing community, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are becoming important. There is a global trend towards flexible manufacturing systems with an increasing number of countries competing for a share of the world market. FMS are increasingly required for companies to meet the demand for high quality, reasonably priced products. FMS allow a manufacturer to quickly change pro...

In this paper, we present the system architecture of a flexible manufacturing planning and control system, named EtoPlan. The concept is based on the holonic control approach of building multiple and temporary hierarchies (holarchies). This paper describes the system architecture for flexible planning and control of activities and (groups of) Resources in a manufacture-to-order environment. The...

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) are nowadays installed in the mechanical industry. In such systems. many different part types are produced simultaneously and it is necessary to take tooling constraints into account for finding an optimal schedule. A heuristic method is presented for solving the m-machine, n-job shop scheduling problem with tooling constraints. This method. named TOMATO, i...

Single row layout is one of the most usually used layout patterns in industries, particularly in flexible manufacturing systems. Here actual sequencing of machine and arrangement of parts, no doubt, have a great influence on the throughput of the flexible manufacturing system i.e., (F.M.S). This paper discusses the single row layout design in flexible manufacturing system (F.M.S). This paper fu...

Most real-time scheduling has focused on a relatively small set of independent tasks directly invoked periodically or via interrupts. In many real-time applications such as flexible manufacturing, this system model is too simplistic. In flexible manufacturing two entirely different sets of resources must be scheduled and “connected.” At the highest level, there are raw materials, robot arms, pl...

The Agde Manufacturing Prototyping System (AMPS) is being integrated at Sandia National Laboratories. AMPS consists of state-of-the-industry flexible manufacturing hardware and software enhanced with Sandia advancements in sensor and model based control; automated programming, assembly and task planning; flexible fixturing; and automated reconfguration technology. AMPS is focused on the agile p...

Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are essential for small/medium batch and job shop manufacturing. These types of production systems are used to manufacture a considerable variety of products with medium/small production volumes. Therefore, the manufacturing platforms supporting these types of production must be flexible and organized in Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC). Programming FMC's ...

The usage of multi-agent systems for manufacturing control seems to be sharply contrasted by classical mathematical control theory. This work emphasizes how views from both scientific fields can be combined to create the flexible and optimal manufacturing control systems of tomorrow.

his study aimed to investigate factors affecting the revenue share of Iranian tomato paste exporting companies. Flexible estimation method was used on a two-dimensional panel data set including 224 observations from 14 tomato paste manufacturing and exporting companies and 16 importing countries during 2005-12. Results showed that value added per employee in manufacturing or exporting companies...

Holonic manufacturing and multi-agent paradigms are suitable to support tbe actual challenges of flexible manufac turing systems, due to their decentralisation, modularity and autonomy features. The formal specification assumes a critical role in order to understand and synthesise those complex systems. The Petri Nets formalism is adequate to model and validate the dynamic behaviour, but presen...