An examination of the impacts of tooling policies in flexible manufacturing environments

Many firms are implementing new manufacturing technologies in their drive to achieve greater competitiveness. An important component of the new process technologies, such as flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), that has not received much attention is tooling. Tooling includes all the jigs, fixtures, pallets, and cutting tools needed to manufacture a part.;This dissertation first identifies some of the relationships between tooling management activities and selected manufacturing objectives. The attainment of those objectives is affected by the allocation and scheduling policies used to control the movement of tools on the shop floor. The tool allocation and scheduling function is also examined in context with other tooling management activities.;The study further evaluates the impact of four tooling policies--bulk exchange, migration, resident, and sharing--on manufacturing objectives of flowtime, utilization of system resources, tardiness, and percent of jobs tardy. Two flexible manufacturing environments are studied. In one environment, the flexible manufacturing system processes a small volume of parts with long cycle times. In the second environment, the system manufactures a high volume of parts with long processing times. The research design also includes the degree of part mix processed on the system and part scheduling rules.;Some previous studies on FMS scheduling have recognized the constraints imposed by tool magazine capacity on the effective performance of the system. The results obtained here indicate that the magnitude of the effect produced by the tool magazine capacity is affected by the degree of tool changing activity, which is, in turn dictated by different tooling policies.;It was observed that when the FMS is used to manufacture parts with long processing times, the bulk exchange policy generally performs better than the other three policies for high or medium part mix. When the part mix is low, the sharing policy performs better than the others. When the processing times of parts are short, the migration and sharing policies provide the best performance irrespective of the degree of part mix variability.