Production engineering

About: Production engineering is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2657 publications have been published within this topic receiving 37409 citations.

Integrated portfolio planning of products and production systems

Abstract: Purpose: The purpose of the research presented is to analyse and discuss critical challenges related A to the development of a production system portfolio. Design/methodology/approach: The study em ...

Capability-based planning and scheduling for adaptable manufacturing systems

Abstract: Manufacturing enterprises can only stay profitable if they manage to flexibly respond to changes in markets by adapting their products, product variants, and product volumes. To support such variety in products, we suggest a capability-based approach for production planning and scheduling. Production plans and machines are described in terms of required capabilities and provided capabilities respectively. Additionally, the topology of the factory is described. We propose to combine these descriptions to automatically generate production schedules that consider the material flow in the factory. For each production plan, our approach generates a valid schedule for the currently available machines in the factory without manually reconfiguring the software. The evaluation of the approach on an industrial production system used for educational purposes shows the suitability of this approach.

Manufacturing strategy and performance: A study of the UK engineering industry

Abstract: Details the findings of a search for manufacturing “strategic groups” in the engineering industry, that is a set of firms competing within an industry on the basis of similar combinations of business scope and resource commitments. The research methodology used was to adopt stockturns (excluding work in process), as a measure of manufacturing scope. Manufacturing throughput efficiency was selected as a measure of production engineering resource commitment. An initial grouping of companies was accomplished by using these two manufacturing performance variables. Comparisons were then made of the manufacturing practices and performances of the firms in the four strategic groups that were formed. The results show statistically significant differences in the performance of each of the strategic groups formed. They can also serve as benchmarks for the evaluation of manufacturing management performance. The proposed manufacturing strategy and performance matrix provides a practical framework for strategic planning.

Numerical Code Generation from a Geometric Modeling System

Abstract: A geometric modeling system (GMS) can, in principle, model the geometric aspects of a manufacturing environment from an entire manufacturing cell through to the tooling details. It offers the capability of an unambiguous model of the component workpiece at all stages of manufacture, thus giving a representation of the stock to be removed by the material removal process. The conversion from a representation suitable for graphics to one more applicable to manufacture can be made. Preliminary studies suggest that a GMS having multiple representations and dimension and tolerance information, together with machinability data, will facilitate the selection of appropriate manufacturing processes and tooling to produce the specified geometry and surface finish. With minimal human intervention, a prototype system would give process planned N/C code, making use of available production engineering data. A further advantage of using the geometric modeler is that the N/C code generated can be verified for all types of invasive machining.