Analytical Assessment of Tooling Requirements for FMS Design and Operation

Abstract

FMS's do not work well if the required amount of tools to carry out processing, during a given manufacturing period, are not available. High operating efficiency can be ensured, once the right number of tools of each type is available, by conveniently solving the problem of assigning tools and parts to machines. This has been identified as the FMS loading problem (Stecke, 1981). Moreover it is essential that good manufacturing control of part processing priority is realised. In this paper an analytical method is presented for initial assessment of the total number of required tools for efficiently running an FMS. The method is based on tool life duration and on a concept referred to as tool cycle time, as well as on the planned manufacturing period. This is usually taken as the time frame for the solution of the FMS loading problem Two fundamental situations are considered, namely that of static tool loading and dynamic tool loading.. Keywords Flexible manufacturing system. static tool loading, dynamic tool loading.

A Framework for Understanding Cellular Manufacturing Systems

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Strategies and fundamental structures for FMS tool flow systems

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