Development of High Speed and High Volume FMS for Agile Manufacturing

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Agile manufacturing has attracted a considerable attention as a new manufacturing concept for next generation which quickly responds to a rapidly varying and personalizing demands of customers. In this study, a high volume manufacturing system for automotive industries is investigated focusing on the capability to replace and/or to supplement the mass production system in order to materialize the agile manufacturing. The system configuration of the proposed system together with its operational system was studied to clarify the characteristics and the conformity of the system to agile manufacturing. Economical aspect of the system was also compared with a conventional flexible transfer line, demonstrating its effectiveness. The major results obtained are summarized as follows :1. A high speed and high volume FMS(HV-FMS) was proposed, based on the studies on the agility to cope with the variety of kinds and volume in large volume manufacturing.2. A parallel and serial machine layout was proposed as a system configuration for the proposed FMS and a simulation system was developed for performance evaluation.3. Studies on the economical aspects were performed for HV-FMS and FTL developing models to evaluate the economical performance. The studies with various scenarios for long term demands revealed that HV-FMS is more economical than FTL under varying demands both on kinds and volumes.4. A new control methodology based on the auction method was implemented for the selection and assignment among works, machines and AGVs as an autonomous operating system of the HV-FMS, and its effectiveness was studied for further development of HV-FMS.