• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.11-18
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• 2016

This paper considers a scheduling problem in a flexible job shop with a reconfigurable manufacturing cell. The flexible job shop has both operation and routing flexibilities, which can be represented in the form of a multiple process plan, i.e. each part can be processed through alternative operations, each of which can be processed on alternative machines. The scheduling problem has three decision variables: (a) selecting operation/machine pairs for each part; (b) sequencing of parts to be fed into the reconfigurable manufacturing cell; and (c) sequencing of the parts assigned to each machine. Due to the reconfigurable manufacturing cell's ability of adjusting the capacity, functionality and flexibility to the desired levels, the priority scheduling approach is proposed in which the three decisions are made at the same time by combining operation/machine selection rules, input sequencing rules and part sequencing rules. To show the performances of various rule combinations, simulation experiments were done on various instances generated randomly using the experiences of the manufacturing experts, and the results are reported for the objectives of minimizing makespan, mean flow time and mean tardiness, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.757-758
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• 2013

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.95-96
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• 2013

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.105-106
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• 2013

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.453-454
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• 2010

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.357-366
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• 2012

To schedule a Reconfigurable Manufacturing Cell (RMC), reconfiguration and setting decisions should be made first. Those decisions, together with characteristics of production orders, affect attainable performance of a system. So an integrative approach is required considering all decisions and characteristics rather than dealing with each of them separately. Pallet-fixture allocation, as a decision problem in setting, which determines the number of pallets to be equipped with each fixture type to produce different types of products, has rarely been investigated. In this study, several pallet-fixture allocation rules are proposed including both simple and novel ones. Then system performance is investigated through various combinations of setting and scheduling decisions (rules) for given system configurations and production orders, via simulation. The result shows that one of proposed pallet-fixture allocation rules which considers both configuration and order characteristic outperforms the others, justifying the necessity of an integrative approach in the RMC operation.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.281-286
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• 2013

As the product lifecycle is getting shorter and various models should be released to respond to the needs of customers and markets, automation-based flexible production line has been recognized as the core competitiveness. According to these trends, system vendors supply cell-level systems such as FMC(Flexible Manufacturing Cell) that is integration of core functions of FMS(Flexible Manufacturing System) and RMC(Reconfigurable Manufacturing Cell) that can easily extend components of FMC. In the cell-based environment, flexible management for shop floor composed of existing job shop, FMCs and RMCs from various system vendors has emerged as an important issue. However, there could be some problems on integrated operation between heterogeneous cells to use vendor-specific cell controllers and on seamless information flow with high level systems such as ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning). In this context, this paper proposes process management systems supporting integrated shop operation of heterogeneous multi-cell based flexible manufacturing environment: First of all, (1) Integrated Shop Operation System to apply the process management system is introduced, and (2) Multi-Layer BOP(Bill-Of-Process) model, a backbone of the process management system, is derived with its data structure. Finally, application of the proposed model is illustrated through system implementation results.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.386-394
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• 2012

Recent trends in the flexible manufacturing systems are morphing cell control for the shop-wide production operation system and providing the integrated operation and execution system together with vendor-specific FMC/FMS platform. In these requirements, the shop-floor level operation system plays a role of coordinating the control activity of each cell, and has to provide flexibility for the complexity of mixed operations of various cells. This paper suggests a system architecture for the mixed environments of multi-cells and job shop, its corresponding enabling technologies based on comparative studies with other related studies and commercialized systems. This approach includes a process definition model considering the integration with upper BOM-BOP and external service modules, and reconfigurable device-level interface which provides dynamic interconnections with machine tools and cell controllers. The function modules and their implementation results are also described to provide the feasibility of the proposed approaches as the flexible shop-floor operation system for the multi-cell environments.