Article Abstract:
Product component standardization and machine flexibility are among the many strategies that manufacturing companies employ to maintain a high level of efficiency amid a large product variety. The complexity of a manufacturing flexibility can be greatly reduced by part standardization, while machine flexibility enables machines to run different operations and process different components, thus reducing machine idle time. The impact of commonality on the three performance criteria of makespan, average machine utilization and factor productivity is investigated in a case study of an automobile parts maker, using the simulation software SIMPLE ++.
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Article Abstract:
A new quantitative measure called cluster goodness is developed to appraise the quality of a solution in the development of cellular manufacturing systems. Cluster goodness aims to quantify cluster compactness and inter-cluster separateness, the two fundamental characteristics of a set of clusters. The effectiveness aligned with any solution is contingent on the compactness of the particular clusters and on their shared separateness. Hence, a superior grouping means an enlargement in compactness, or an enlargement in separateness or both.
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Article Abstract:
A simulated annealing algorithm is derived to deal with the problem of batching within the context of a flexible manufacturing system in production planning. The batching problem occurs because of the limited quantity of production resources. Computational results show that the derived algorithm performs quite well in terms of time and quality. Furthermore, the algorithm is considered applicable even for more difficult and bigger problems.
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