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A simulation study of tooling effects in automated manufacturing.

With advent of complex and expensive automated manufacturing systems tool management is becoming an important issue both in design and implementation phases. The use of highly automated technology has resulted in an increasing need to integrate tool management more thoroughly into other planning and operational issues of these systems. In this research effort a discrete events simulation model has been developed to analyze the system performance under different operational strategies. These strategies include three tool configurations; identical, nonidentical and hybrid, and two part loading patterns; batch and random loading. In addition, a new tool refilling concept, tool replenishing, is also examined. The replenishing concept consists of two policies; preventive and failure replenishing. The effects of shared and dedicated tooling policies have also been investigated. With the comparison of performance measures for each set of operational strategies, the mutual advantages and concerns of each of them are highlighted. Within the simulation scope, the shared tooling policy is significantly superior to the dedicated tooling policy. It is also shown that identical tool configuration outperforms the other tool configurations. These have been confirmed by statistical tests performed on the simulation results.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6778
Date January 1994
CreatorsAmini Vadeghani, Siros.
ContributorsLiang, Ming,
PublisherUniversity of Ottawa (Canada)
Source SetsUniversité d’Ottawa
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format200 p.

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