Future Manufacturing Systems

Intelligent robots can be used to automatically pick the right work piece without interference of operator and hence improves quality and pace of work. Manufacturing companies at the beginning of 21th century have to face a dynamic environment where economical, technological and customer trends change rapidly, requiring the increase of flexibility and agility to react to unexpected disturbances, maintaining the productivity and quality parameters. The traditional manufacturing control systems are adapted on a case-by- case basis, requiring an expensive and huge time-consuming effort to develop, maintain or re-configure. The missing re- configurability is derived from the lack of agility to support emergency (change and unexpected disturbances). The challenge is to develop innovative, agile and reconfigurable architectures for distributed manufacturing control systems, using emergent paradigms and technologies. Multi-agent systems and HMSs are two promising paradigms to build this new class of distributed and intelligent manufacturing control systems. In this chapter, the manufacturing control systems, especially using artificial intelligence techniques to develop it, namely multi-agent systems and HMSs, was reviewed. Two case studies have been discussed in detail and their contributions, results and benefits of applying agent and holonic manufacturing control have been reviewed. In first case study, a new real-time scheduling methods for the HMS are proposed to select a suitable combination of the CNC machine tool (CMT) holons and the job holons which carry out the machining process. A distributed decision-making procedure is proposed to select a suitable combination of the CMT holons and the job holons for the next machining processes, based on the utility values for the candidates. Some case studies of the real-time scheduling have been carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. It was shown, through case studies, that the proposed methods are effective to improve the objective functions of the individual holons. In the second case study, a multi-agent system was proposed for the integrated process planning and scheduling systems for the FMSs. A systematic procedure was proposed to generate suitable process plans of the jobs and suitable schedules of the machine tools. The proposed method is able to solve the process planning and scheduling problems concurrently and dynamically, with use of the mathematical optimization methods and search algorithms of the process plan networks. Some case studies have been carried out to verify the applicability of the proposed method to the integrated process planning and scheduling problems in the FMSs including 7 machine tools and 10 jobs. It was shown, through the case studies, that the proposed multi-agent architecture is capable to generate appropriate process plans and schedules. It was also shown that the proposed architecture generates alternative process plans dynamically, to cope with the malfunctions of the machine tools and unforeseen job specification changes. In the future research, we are trying to expand the architecture for other objective functions and multi objective integrated process planning and scheduling. We also are trying to develop general agents according to DCOM technology and defining interfaces for them that make agents possible to connect directly to ORIN to communicate with manufacturing hardware, real timely This research has introduced significant policy implications to Agile practitioners. First of all, software development activities which follow Agile process, can be considerably benefited through using the proposed process model. In fact, the proposed process model successfully, creates more value oriented, certain, value streamed, and productive software development environment over the classical Agile approach. The research results also reveal a more defect free development activity, essentially in the crucial stages of the development. Importantly, the proposed blended process shows more stability over frequent requirement changes, which is inevitable within an Agile process based software development. The used Lean principles have acted as stabilizing agents within certain Agile practices. Another possible implication derives from this study is that, like the proposed process practice improves the development works within the software development phase, there is a significant potential to improve the other software lifecycle phases, such as, Requirement Engineering, Design, Testing, and Deployment, even though they are less visible within the Agile practices. In fact, more dominancy on development phase alone, has made the Agile practices more vulnerable to process instability, frequent changes and overhead development works. With the Lean practices, Agile process can have short yet steady Requirement Engineering, Design and Testing phases without affecting to the main development works. Moreover, the recent hype on Agile manufacturing can also be benefited from the amalgamation of suitable Lean concepts as required. This means, though this study was mainly focused on software industry, it is possible to extend the proposed process model as required for other industries of interest. Specially, the industries of promising future with Preface......Page 7 Dr. Tauseef Aized......Page 9 Constantin Filote and Calin Ciufudean......Page 25 Rodrigo da Rosa Righi, Laércio Pilla, Alexandre Carissimi, Philippe Navaux and Hans-Ulrich Heiss......Page 47 Mehmet Savsar......Page 73 Sugimura Nobuhiro,Tehrani Nik Nejad Hossein and Iwamura koji......Page 103 Dr. Tauseef Aized......Page 129 Larysa Burtseva, Victor Yaurima and Rainier Romero Parra......Page 145 ACO-based Multi-objective Scheduling of Identical Parallel Batch Processing Machines in Semiconductor Manufacturing......Page 171 Dominik T. Matt......Page 187 Indika Perera......Page 203 Eva M. Rubio and Roberto Teti......Page 225 Xiaoyu Song......Page 243 Batch processing machines play important roles in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. In this paper, we modeled the batch processing operations in a real wafer fab as an identical PBPM problem considering the practical complications of incompatible job families, dynamic job arrivals, sequence-dependent setup times and qual-run requirements of APC, and proposed an ACO algorithm to solve the problem with smaller TWT and makespan than