Design lessons for building agile manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper summarizes results of a five-year, multidisciplinary, university-industry collaborative effort investigating design issues in agile manufacturing. The focus of this project is specifically on light mechanical assembly, with the demand that new assembly tasks be implementable quickly, economically, and effectively. Key to achieving these goals is the ease of equipment and software reuse. Design choices for both hardware and software must strike a balance between the inflexibility of special-purpose designs and the impracticality of overly general designs. We review both our physical and software design choices and make recommendations for the design of agile manufacturing systems.

Short cycle time systems development

“…Indeed, proper use of information technology is a key facilitator of agility in organizations (Goldman et al. , 1995; Newman et al ., 2000). The concept of agile software development has consequently become more‐or‐less synonymous with short cycle time development and Internet speed development (Aoyama, 1998; Wetherbe & Frolick, 2000).…”

“…Aside from these comprehensive software methodologies, other studies have advocated more specific elements of short cycle processes. For example, authorities on component‐based approaches have been quick to indicate these as a means for achieving short development cycles and the consequent software agility (Newman et al ., 2000; Sparling, 2000). Other work regards the reasons for the rise of short cycle time development.…”

Automated process planning and cost estimation under material quality uncertainty

“…In order to achieve such objectives, some studies associated with the system development have been proposed. Bhandarkar et al [74] and Newman et al [75] indicate that the manufacturing paradigm has been shifted from traditional manufacturing to the agile manufacturing, which meets customers' demands rapidly. Jiang et al [76] described the development of an automatic process planning system (APPS), which enables generate process planning rapidly from a CAD image.…”

Supervisory synthesis for product-driven automation and its application to a flexible assembly cell

“…From a syntactic point of view, IEC 61499 3 provides a function block structure where the clear separation between execution control and algorithm description facilitates dynamic reconfiguration. From a semantic point of view, interoperability requires the standardisation of component interfaces and behaviour as well as the definition of a collaboration protocol (Endsley et al 2006;Wright & Bourne, 1988;Newman et al, 2000).…”