Abstract:
As current market competition evolves, most companies intend to increase their
options for product customisation and accelerate their product upgrading.
Correspondingly, manufacturers have to face the increasing size of product family,
shortened product life cycle or rapid product/process change. Therefore, Flexible
Manufacturing Systems (FMS) have been introduced that uses advanced machines
and efficient transport systems to produce multiple products at the same time.
However, an FMS can be complicated to manage because of the increased variability
in products and processes. The research aims to develop manufacturing simulation
and optimisation techniques for a FMS. This research will integrate Discrete Event
Simulation (DES) and multi-objective optimisation approach to address the complexity
and flexibility within an agile manufacturing environment.
Due to the complexity of FMS, most current FMS optimisation research has engaged
with FMS production problems separately without considering other inter-related
problems in the same system such as dealing with operation sequence problem
without considering Level of Flexibility (LoF), thus it is hard for the solution to provide
a prospective impact for the whole system. There are very few real-world FMS
implementations that are available to literatures, making it difficult to build and verify
the models within a complete ecosystem. Consequently, most of the models in the
research are oversimplified. Therefore, this research aims to develop a method to
optimise FMS production considering the overall system, by having access to an FMS
industrial implementation.
This research contributes to knowledge in four main areas, namely, (1) the interactions
of FMS production problems have been investigated, (2) a framework has been
developed to integrate the simulation and optimisation for FMS to enable optimisation
algorithms working with DES models effectively, (3) a comprehensive FMS simulation
model has been built and validated on the industrial shop floor and (4) multi-objective
optimisation has been applied to the FMS scheduling problem, considering
interactions with other problems. Based on the results and limitations of this research,
real-time simulation, mock-up FMS and improve computational efficiency are
suggested for future work.