Economical Analysis of High Volume Flexible Manufacturing System for Agile Manufacturing

Abstract

We focus on the economical aspect of a high-volume flexible manufacturing system (HV-FMS) for agile manufacturing. We develop a model to estimate the economical behavior of HV-FMS and flexible transfer line. Under several demand patterns which have been generated from historical data, both models are simulated to evaluate the effectiveness ofHV-FMS from an economical view point.

A study on characterization of agile manufacturing system with square array layout of machining centres

“…The bid types used for the auction to select the MC have the significant influence to the resulting tool set allocation. The auction bid set BP [1,2], based on the distance from the pallet changing station to the MC, can characterize each MC to process a specific OP forming a material flow from left to right. The auction bid set BP [l,3], based on the ratio of frequency of processed product kinds at an MC, can characterize each MC to process a specific product kind enabling MCs to be grouped by the product kind.…”

“…The prespecified parameters for the characterization algorithms are 30,000 work pieces and 480hours. Figure 6 shows the change in the make-span when the tool sets are reduced from 570 by CA-a using BP [1,2]. As shown in the Figure, the make-span to manufacture 30,000 pieces does not exceed the prespecified 480 working hours until the tool sets are reduced to 79 in this case.…”

“…On the other hand, flexible transfer line (I<l'L) has been utilized for a mass production system by a series of numerically controlled machining cells arranged in a flow line. We have proposed high volume flexible manufacturing system (HV-FMS) as a new manufacturing system dissolving the limitations of FMS and FTL, which attains the high flexibility as well as the high volume production by a serial-parallel layout of machining cells as shown in Figure 1 (Fujii et al, 1998a(Fujii et al, , 1998b(Fujii et al, , 1999a(Fujii et al, 2000a(Fujii et al, , 2002. In HV-FMS, machining processes of the target products are grouped into some processing groups (OPs).…”

Economic Analysis of a High‐volume Flexible Manufacturing System by High‐speed Processing

“…In this study, we process three kinds of cylinder heads (A, B, C) with a product mix (45%, 20%, 35%). We investigated the robustness for the machine failure in a previous study (Fujii et al, 1998b), and then in this paper, we focus on the energy-saving effect.…”

A basic study on autonomous characterization of square array machining cells for agile manufacturing

“…Since most of the products processed by FMS, FTL or HV-FMS are similar kinds with different sizes and different topologies for processing, e.g., differences in number, size and/or position of holes, the processing operations of products can be divided into some groups mostly based on the processability on one cell without changing the orientation of the work on a pallet. HV-FMS having a serial-parallel layout of machining cells is proposed taking this nature into consideration (Fujii, et al 1998a(Fujii, et al , 1998b(Fujii, et al , 2000. Parallel MCs in HV-FMS have the same tools and machining programs for processing of a prespecified operation group and can process the operations of any work.…”