Fast and dramatic changes in customer expectations, competition, and technology are creating an increasingly uncertain environment. To respond, manufacturers are seeking to enhance flexibility across the value chain. Manufacturing flexibility, a critical dimension of value chain flexibility, is the ability to produce a variety of products in the quantities that customers demand while maintainin...

The emphasis on increasing product variety and individualization has created a strong demand for a new strategy of Mass Customization Manufacturing (MCM). A competitive and flexible manufacturing system must be developed to respond to small batches of customer demand. In this paper, problems of highly flexible process-control and logistics-management methodologies are addressed to meet MCM need...

The use of transactions in flexible manufacturing systems is expected to result in a number of advantages like increased software reliability and minimized restart times in the case of system or machine failures. Here, an architecture of a system for handling processes on machine tools under transactional protection is briefly presented. Special attention must be drawn to the component which de...

In this paper, scheduling problems in Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) are studied. The scheduling objective is to minimize the makespan. We used a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the optimization scheduling problem. We have developed one FMC with industrial characteristics with the objective of studying scheduling problems in these types of manufacturing systems (single machine scheduling...

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...

This paper presents a novel scheduling of resource-constrained Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) with consideration the following sub-problems: (i) machine loading and unloading, (ii) manufacturing operation scheduling, (iii) assignment, (iv) Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) scheduling. In proposed model, both AGV machinery are considered as required resources. Energy efficiency AGVs has been s...