Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are distinguished by the use of computer control in
place of the hard automation usually found in transfer lines. The high investment required for …

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses different approaches to performance evaluation
(PE) of discrete manufacturing systems that can be placed in three categories. These …

In industrial production, distributed control is perceived to be a promising approach for
dealing with challenges arising from the increasing dynamical and structural complexity in …

The series Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage technology transfer
in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all …

Petri net modeling combined with heuristic search provides a new scheduling method for
flexible manufacturing systems. The method formulates a scheduling problem with a Petri …

Recent advances in the theory and practice of production scheduling cut across traditional
disciplinary boundaries. Different research communities have addressed different aspects of …

The evidence is clear that a lack of attention to structured tool management has resulted in
the poor performance of many manufacturing systems. Plant tooling systems affect product …

Advanced manufacturing technology is quickly displacing humans from the factory floor, but
relatively little is known about how much responsibility humans should retain over plant …

Reconfigurable manufacturing is a promising new paradigm, which covers many aspects of
change from reconfigurable machine tools to transformable factories. A control analogy is …

Modern manufacturing systems pose a diversity of problems all along their life cycle which
are often treated with particular independent formalisms and techniques. Petri nets are a …