In order to stabilize the global climate the world’s governments must make significant commitments to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One of the most promising methods of curbing GHG emissions is a world transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Solar photovoltaic (PV) cells offer a technically sustainable solution to the projected enormous future en...

Constantly changing business conditions require a high level of flexibility in business processes as well as an adaptive and fully interoperable IT infrastructure in today’s manufacturing environments. The lack of flexibility prevents manufacturing companies from improving their responsiveness and adapting their workflows to turbulent scenarios. In order to achieve highly flexible and adaptive ...

Cloud manufacturing is defined as a relationship between the consumer and a flexible array of production services, managed by an intervening architecture that can match service providers to product and manufacturing processes Cloud manufacturing definitions typically make explicit or imply three groups of actors: consumers, who request and use cloud manufacturing processes; application provider...

Material handling tasks in the job shops have to be coordinated with manufacturing operations in order to efficiently utilize the production resources and to reduce the accumulation of work-in-process inventory. This paper extends the traditional job shop scheduling problem by incorporating the scheduling of the material handling tasks. It provides a generic definition and a network model for t...

This paper proposes an optimal solution to large-scale Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) scheduling problems under availability constraints based on Timed Petri Nets (TPNs). First a decomposition method of TPNs is proposed, then a mathematical model is derived based on their properties. The mathematical model is built to determine the optimal firing sequence of TPN transitions to minimize the...

The 70’s has often been viewed as the decade of quality improvement, during which companies began to invest heavily in quality improvements, and Total Quality Management became a buzzword. In the 80’s, with quality a given, the competitive landscape shifted to lean manufacturing, focusing on concepts such as just-in-time, flexible manufacturing, and zero inventory, in order to achieve manufactu...

This work presents a description of the implementation of the WebMachining methodology and system (http://WebMachining.AlvaresTech.com) developed in a context of e-Mfg and Concurrent Engineering, aiming at integrating CAD/CAPP/CAM for the remote manufacturing of cylindrical components through the Internet. The methodology and its implementation are conceived starting from the modelling paradigm...

Manufacturing systems are changing its structure and organisation. Supply chain are evolving to more coupled organisations, like virtual enterprises, though maintaining the single entities autonomy, adaptability and dynamism properties. Such organisations are very different, which imply organisational and technological shift through agility, distribution, decentralisation, reactivity and flexib...

In the current global market, traditional hierarchical approaches for manufacturing scheduling and control don’t produce the desired results. It occurs especially in Job-Shop manufacturing configurations. In order to overcome the limitations that hierarchical and centralized architectures show in new manufacturing systems, many decentralized schemes have been proposed. Most of those proposals a...

The paper aims, in the field of manufacturing technologies, at approaching issues of manufacturing systems, in order to develop a new concept of management, which is in line with the current market dynamics: the concept of competitive management. The concept of competitive management can offer solutions even to make competitive and develop enterprises as a whole. However, improving competitiven...