Purpose – To examine the need to develop, practice and implement such maintenance practices, which not only reduce sudden sporadic failures in semi‐automated cells but also reduce both operation and maintenance (O&M) costs.Design/methodology/approach – A case‐based approach in conjunction with standard tools, techniques and practices is used to discuss various issues related with TPM implementation in a semi‐automated cell.Findings – The findings indicate that TPM not only leads to increase in efficiency and effectiveness of manufacturing systems, measured in terms of OEE index, by reducing the wastages but also prepares the plant to meet the challenges put forward by globally competing economies to achieve world class manufacturing (WCM) status.Originality/value – The paper presents an interesting investigation of TPM implementation issues which may help the managers/practitioners to prepare their plants/units to meet the challenges of competitive manufacturing in twenty‐first century by adopting and imp...

Manufacturing excellence through TPM implementation: a practical analysis

This paper presents a constraint programming (CP) methodology to deal with the scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The proposed approach, which consists of both a model and a search strategy, handles several features found in industrial environments, such as limitations on number of tools in the system, lifetime of tools, as well as tool magazine capacity of machines. In addition, it tackles the problem in a integrated way by considering tool planning and allocation, machine assignment, part routing, and task timing decisions altogether in the approach. The formulation, which is able to take into account a variety of objective functions, has been successfully applied to the solution of test problems of various sizes and degrees of difficulty.

A constraint programming approach to tool allocation and production scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems

Global competition, advancements in technology and ever changing customers’ demand have made the manufacturing companies to realize the importance of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). These organizations are looking at FMS as a viable alternative to enhance their competitive edge. But, implementation of this universally accepted and challenging technology is not an easy task. A large number of articles have been reviewed and it is found that the existing literature lacks in providing a clear picture about the implementation of FMS. In this paper, work of various researchers has been studied and it is found that it is really a very difficult task for any organization to transform into FMS on the basis of existing research results. A wide gap exists between the proposed approaches/algorithms for the design of different components of FMS and the real-life complexities. Besides describing the gap in various issues related to FMS, some barriers, which inhibit the adaptation and implementation of FMS, have also been identified in this paper.

A review of some issues and identification of some barriers in the implementation of FMS

A constraint programming model for the scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems with machine and tool limitations

Petri net based decision system modeling in real-time scheduling and control of flexible automotive manufacturing systems

In recent years, due to highly competitive market conditions, it has become necessary for manufacturing systems to have quick response times and high flexibility. Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS's) have gained attention in response to this challenge. FMS has the ability to produce a variety of parts using the same system. However this flexibility comes at the price, which is the development of efficient and effective methods for integrated production planning, and control. In this paper, we analyze the production planning problem in flexible manufacturing systems. We address the problems of part loading, tool loading, and part scheduling. We assume that there is a set of tools with known life and a set of machines that can produce a variety of parts. A batch of various part types is routed through this system with the assumption that the processing time and cost vary with the assignment of parts to different machines and assignment of various tool sets to machines. We developed a mathematical model to select machines and assign operations and the required tools to machines in order to minimize the summation of maximum completion time, material handling time, and total processing time. We first integrate and formulate loading, and routing, two of the most important FMS planning problems, as a 0–1 mixed integer programming problem. We then take the output from the integrated planning model and generate a detailed operations schedule. The results reported in this paper demonstrate the model efficiency and examine the performance of the system with respect to measures such as production rate and utilization.

M Gamila

Papers

A modeling technique for loading and scheduling problems in FMS