In recent times flexible manufacturing systems emerged as a powerful technology to meet the continuous changing customer demands. Increase in the performance of flexible manufacturing systems is expected as a result of integration of the shop floor activities such as machine and vehicle scheduling. The authors made an attempt to integrate machine and vehicle scheduling with an objective to mini...

Facing new challenges and more uncertainty, manufacturers see the need for flexible solutions and the need to strive to achieve flexibility. However, flexibility is still not well understood and no unambiguous understanding of flexibility exists. The paper first summarizes the state of the field of flexibility, exploring different definitions and understandings of the flexibility concept from t...

The task of scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) is more complex and problematic than a traditional manufacturing systems. To accomplish great performance for FMS, a good scheduling system should make an accurate decision at an accurate time according to system situations. Fuzzy logic methodologies easily deal with indeterminate and incomplete information. Human expert‟s knowledge...

Paradigms in modern production are shifting and pose new demands for optimization techniques. The emergence of new, versatile, reconfigurable and networked machines enables flexible manufacturing scenarios which require, in particular, planning and scheduling methods for cyber-physical production systems to be flexible, reasonably fast, and anytime. This paper presents an approach to flexible j...

Scheduling of production in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) has been extensively investigated over the past years and it continues to attract the interest of both academic researchers and practitioners. The generation of new and modified production schedules is becoming a necessity in today’s complex manufacturing environment. Genetic algorithms are used in this paper to obtain an initial...

The combination of multi-functional machines and mobile robots supports the emergence of highly flexible intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS). In this kind of manufacturing system, some machines must stay fixed at previously established positions (heavy equipment) but some types of multi-functional machines (small flexible equipment and mobile robots) can stay in one position for one or seve...

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...

OF THE PHD THESIS Researches on the design and management of manufacturing systems Ciprian CRISTEA Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania The PhD thesis is being structured on seven chapters. Each one of them begins with a set of objectives and it ends with the conclusions. Chapter 1 makes an introduction in the problem of manufacturing and contains an evolution of the manufacturing conce...