Search results

Reports development and simulation of real‐time dispatching procedures, for flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) in constant production circumstances, where a fixed set of part types is processed continuously while maintaining constant ratios between quantities needed of each part type. Five different procedures were tested: the first based on a simple rule, called the largest relative advantage (LRA) rule; two procedures linear programming based (named FMLPP and ALPP); a pull‐type procedure; and the last based on SPT rule. As expected, one of the linear programming based procedures achieved the best results. However, the much simpler LRA based procedure produced similar results, especially in the presence of machine failures. It was shown that, for high processing flexibility, good performance may be achieved by a dispatching procedure using the cell processing flexibility. In contrast to this, in low processing flexibility situations, there is no significant difference between the various scheduling procedures.

This paper deals with a systematic approach for deriving an object based information model for CIM systems. Owing to the complex nature of CIM environment it is often difficult to identify data structures and functionality of such a system. An object based modeling methodology is presented, along with clustering based procedure for deriving a static structure model from functional requirements. Performance measures for evaluating the “quality” of the derived model are presented and discussed. A sample manufacturing application is provided in order to illustrate the approach.