Research On Flow Manufacturing Based On Virtual Manufacturing Cells

The market competition is becoming fiercer and fiercer, and the individuality and diversity of consumers'demand is increasing, which induce manufacturers to speed up the renovation and shrink the cycle time of production. These new features challenge the traditional production model and make a shift from the high volume, repetitive mass production to high-mix and low volume production. However, the existing technology of lean manufacturing which is appropriate mainly for high volume and repetitive production has been proven difficult to apply in new production environment. In order to realize the fast reconfiguration and response to the changing market demand in enterprise, a new type of flow manufacturing based on the virtual manufacturing cells has been introduced.Integrated with many operation theories and methods, such as group technology, theory of constraints, flow manufacturing and virtual manufacturing cells, a new flow manufacturing operation framework based on virtual manufacturing cells is built. And its three main features are as following: firstly, the production is based on parts families which can not only improve the efficiency of the shared equipments or cells, but also greatly reduce and simplify the materials flow in factory. Therefore the production process is easier to control and manage; secondly, quick programming of flow path is achieved by using virtual manufacturing cells, which improve rapid response and reconfigure ability of manufacturing system; thirdly, different suitable operation methods are adopted according to each flow routing's own characteristics, but all of them in the framework should be under the control of the mechanism of flow manufacturing and exchange information promptly and exactly.In order to realize the flow manufacturing model based on virtual manufacturing cells, this thesis analyzes the key techniques in detail. The problems of manufacturing resource selection and workload balance are solved by using the theory of virtual manufacturing cells'construction. The bottleneck-based heuristic scheduling algorithm is proposed with the combination of TOC, meanwhile the optimization of scheduling and control in flow manufacturing model are realized. On the background of a textile enterprise, this thesis gives a preliminary application and validation of flow manufacturing based on virtual manufacturing cells. At last, based on the summary of the whole content, future research direction on how to improve and systematically realize this model is point out.