Research On Time Predetermination Method And Related System Development Under Single-piece And Small-batch Environment

As product pattern driven by customers’ demands and reusing typical historic parts andtechniques, the product types of single-piece and small-batch production have becomemore and more, that also requires more on the flexibility of production system and thetime predetermination method. Recently, single-piece and small-batch enterprisesseparate the product structure and the production techniques in the timepredetermination process, which makes the time predetermination’s low-efficiency andlow-precision, also recent time predetermination methods have very low versatility,these all make the pricing and production planning very difficult in the single-piece andsmall-batch enterprises. So, establishing a versatile, high-efficiency and high-precisiontime predetermination method is very urgent for all single-piece and small-batchenterprises.In this paper, we first analyzed previous modularized time predetermination method andpointed out its defects, then, we proposed the modified modularized timepredetermination method. Based on this method, we presented the productmodularization method. In this method, we divided the product time into two parts, thatis, the entity carrier time and the technique carrier time. The entity carrier time can befurther divided into part carrier time and module carrier time. The technique carrier timecan be further divided into assembly technique time, fixed technique time and variedtechnique time. When we use this method, first we divide the product layer by layer toknown and unknown time carriers, for those known time carriers, we can search theirtime in the database, for those unknown part time carriers, we use the artificial neuralnetworks to calculate their time and for those unknown technique time carriers, we cancalculate their time through the combination of database and mathematics. Finally, wecan get the product time through the summation of all the time carriers.Then we studied the time predetermination system based on the method above,established its function model, the database design scheme, interface design and I/Odesign, also, we studied the codes about how to use Treeview to establish the productstructure, how to use VB combined with Matlab to construct the artificial neuralnetwork for the calculation of the parts’ time, how to use VB and EXCEL to output theproduct time, which all guarantee the technical feasibility of the time predeterminationsystem. In the end, we put the method into use of the predetermination of transformers in anenterprise, constructed the entity carrier database and the technique carrier database,established the artificial neural network for some key variant-parts to calculate theirtime. The feasibility and applicability has been verified through the use in theenterprise.