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...

This paper studies the optimal investment strategies of an incumbent and a potential entrant that can both choose between a product flexible and dedicated technology, in a two-product market characterized by uncertain demand. The product flexible production technology has certain advantages,...

This paper is concerned with the Multi-Row Facility Layout Problem. Given a set of rectangular departments, a fixed number of rows, and weights for each pair of departments, the problem consists of finding an assignment of departments to rows and the positions of the departments in each row so...

The loading problem in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) consider several different manufacturing settings and objective functions but some crucial aspects of FMS environments, such as flexible process plans (FPP), have not yet received adequate attention. FPPs are vital in coping with...

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 investigates the effects of dynamic due-date assignment models (DDDAMs), routing flexibility levels (RFLs), sequencing flexibility levels (SFLs) and part sequencing rules (PSRs) on the performance of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The existing DDDAMs considered are dynamic...

The co-existence of large and small companies in nowadays supply chains may led to misunderstandings which are prejudicial to the supply chain performance. Based on several studies in aeronautical supply chains, we list some of typical problems linked to the relationship between large and small...

This paper deals with a new modeling approach for mode handling of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Based on a review of the modeling methods and the specification formalisms in the existing approaches, we show that the mutual benefit of functional modeling and synchronous languages is very...