The evidence is clear that a lack of attention to structured tool management has resulted in the poor performance of many manufacturing systems. Plant tooling systems affect product design options, machine loading, job batching, capacity scheduling, and real-time part routing decisions. With...

A quadratic model for production-inventory planning was made famous by Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon in 1960 in [3], especially for its application to a paint factory. A discrete control version of a related quadratic production-inventory model was studied by Kleindorfer, Kriebel, Thompson,...

This paper contains numerous extensions and refinements to event graphs which were recently introduced by Schruben for simulation modelling. These new results are integrated with Schruben's work to present a complete description of event graphs and their analysis. A (simple) flexible...

This paper introduces the generic concept of processing rates as decision variables in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS's). The objective is to determine the minimum cost processing rates given the FMS throughput target, the work-in-process level, part routes, transporter delays, and the...

This paper is concerned with the rate of diffusion of flexible manufacturing systems, one of the most important industrial applications of information technology. Using data from about 175 firms, I analyze diffusion rates in Japan, Western Europe and the United States, a major purpose being to...

This paper presents a model and an analysis of the cost-flexibility tradeoffs involved in investing in product-flexible manufacturing capacity. Flexible capacity provides a firm with the ability to respond to a wide variety of future demand outcomes, but at the expense of the increased cost of...

This paper examines the relationship between one form of manufacturing flexibility---process range---and structure, infrastructure, and managerial policy at the plant level. The paper provides evidence of the strength of the links between manufacturing flexibility and such factors as scale,...

This paper presents an algorithm for efficiently sequencing the cutting operations associated with the manufacture of discrete parts on a CNC machine. The problem is first modeled as an integer program but recast via Lagrangian relaxation as a min-cut problem on a bipartite network. Tight lower...

In this paper, we examine the general problem of workload allocation in an open Jackson network of multiserver queues. We show that use of the open network model leads to a separable, convex formulation of the problem with relatively simple optimality conditions. Using these conditions, we prove...

Firms that build flexibility into their manufacturing system gain a competitive edge from their ability to efficiently produce a mid-variety of products at mid-volumes. In order to realize the competitive edge of flexible systems, manufacturing management has to deal effectively with the greater...