Manufacturing flexibility is one of the key determinants of development of modern production systems. The article presents the importance of flexibility factor in the process of manufacturing systems development during the 20 th century. In particular, craft manufacturing, dedicated manufacturing systems (DMS) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) were characterized. Finally, actual problems...

An FMS is a manufacturing system in which groups of numerically controlled machines and a material handling system work together under computer control. Scheduling is a decision making process to determine when a job is to be started in a machine and when it is to be completed. A carefully designed and efficiently managed material handling system plays an important role in planning and operatio...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is an application of modern manufacturing techniques. Like for other manufacturing equipment, the success of an FMS is very much dependent upon its trouble-free operation. It is crucial to monitor all the possible faults or abnormalities in real time and, when a fault is detected, react quickly in order to maintain the productivity of the FMS. Because of th...

This paper presents the design and the implementation of a Petri net (PN) model for the control of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). A flexible automotive manufacturing system used in this environment enables quick cell configuration, and the efficient operation of cells. In this paper, we attempt to propose a flexible automotive manufacturing approach for modeling and analysis of shop flo...

In this paper we introduce the architecture of an allocation and management system capable to deal with the complexity of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). We show how to obtain the model of an FMS based on Coloured Petri Nets (CPN). This model is independent of a speciic production trajectory (route), based on CPN. The introduction of fault tolerance in the model of such allocation and man...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a highly automated, complex system. Simulation is a well-proven method to design or analyze an FMS. Deployment of a radio frequency identification (RFID) system in FMS produces large volumes of RFID data streams, which provide valuable information to improve the operation of FMS. Different frameworks are presented in this paper regarding the use of RFID ...

A Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is designed to produce a variety of products, utilizing a set of resources like work stations, robots etc., interlinked by certain means of transport. The prime characteristic of an FMS is that the overall system is under the computer control to realize these essential improvements in a firm; it imposes many challenging problems for planning, scheduling, mo...

The static and analytic scheduling approach is very difficult to follow and is not always applicable in real-time. Most of the scheduling algorithms are designed to be established in offline environment. However, we are challenged with three characteristics in real cases: First, problem data of jobs are not known in advance. Second, most of the shop’s parameters tend to be stochastic. Third, th...

The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has attracted substantial amount of research effort during the last twenty years. Most of the studies address the issues of flexibility, productivity, cost, and so forth. The impact of flexible lines on product quality is less studied. This paper intends to address this issue by applying a Markov model to evaluate quality performance of a flexible manufac...