Part family formation using skip moves and lazy machines in a reconfigurable manufacturing system
by Ahmad Mehmood; Mohammad Faisal Noor; Shivani Upadhyay; Faisal Hasan; Masood Ashraf
International Journal of Modelling in Operations Management (IJMOM), Vol. 5, No. 3/4, 2015

Abstract: With the advent of modern manufacturing systems like RMSs many issues pertaining to its design and implementation has been taken up in the recent past. As per definition, RMS design initiates with the classification of product into part families. Subsequent reconfiguration of the system is carried out to cater new part families. The issue of part family formation in RMS is considered to be of utmost importance for this new manufacturing paradigm, i.e., RMS as the complete philosophy of its design and operation revolves around part families. Thus, it becomes exceeding important that parts must be grouped into logical families based on similarities in manufacturing or design features to physically realise the implementation of RMSs. Though some techniques for such formation for RMSs were proposed in the past but the present technique eliminates some of the shortcoming in those proposed techniques. In the present paper, an operations string-based methodology known as skip moves and lazy machines (SMLM) has been undertaken for part family formation. The paper also discusses on some of the early similarity indices developed using operation sequencing. The technique is demonstrated using a numerical example and the results are finally discussed in light of some previous researches on the topic.

Online publication date: Tue, 05-Apr-2016

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