| Research Abstract |
Business environment of manufacturing industries is in a huge pile of tough problems due to emerging globalisation, recent diversification of customer' needs and instability of world economy. In this project, recognising the necessity of flexibility enhancement to cope with these problems, some operating functions providing flexibility of production systems is investigated for the given production facilities. These functions are represented in terms of the software management packages. Considered production systems in this project include flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) as a kernel domain, line production systems as the popular facilities in assembly factories, batch production systems as often observed devices in process industries. Obtained results were published in terms of 18 papers in journals and selected paper books. These are classified into the following categories.
1) Loading sub-system concerned issues : In this category, based on the FMS loading procedure developed by K
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.Shanker, a robust and flexible loading planning system, which enables to respond volatile market, was developed through algorithm improvement.
2) Dispatching sub-system concerned issues : Aiming the same objective as the first category, an agile and effective job dispatching system was developed through investigation of dispatching procedures used in actual firms.
3) Integrated system concerned issues : In this category, both loading and dispatching functions are integrated and some operation procedures, which actualise overall performance of production systems, were developed. Especially, these provide a new focusing stand point of hierarchical planning framework., where dispatching functions should seek optimisation under the constraint of the planning result of loading procedures.
4) On their validity check and positioning in business scene : Based on the information collected through interviewing and questionnaire sending to the flexibility concerned enterprises, contents of flexibility the firms are desiring were considered and examined.
5) Other contributions : As a miscellaneous category, emerging concepts such as lean/agile production, which are closely related with flexibility, were discussed and a new direction for improving manufactureing performance was provided.
As the final remark, this project accomplished a certain contribution for flexibility enhancement through these outcomes. Less
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