| In response to the increasing complexity of the manufacturing environment and the rapid change of market requirements, a new methodology for process design is applied in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs). The methodology is used to model, design, and reconfigure the processes and to facilitate collaborative manufacturing among different companies or different departments within one company. The methodology can help to manage the enormous quantity and variety of process data generated from the changes in functional requirements, production facilities, and manufacturability. It can also improve system's flexibility to new production and adaptability to new process technology.; In this thesis, in order to apply the methodology in a real industrial practice, a case study has been conducted to capture the processes and to set up a process model for making a variety of pulleys at Focus: Hope in Detroit, Michigan. Based on the process model, a hierarchy approach of constraint management is represented for reconfiguring processes efficiently in reconfigurable manufacturing systems. A unique aspect of this process model is that it uses a grammar-based approach to capture both processes and constraints in hierarchy structure, which facilitates a way to apply a multilevel multiple criteria decision-making model (MMCDM) for process selection. Within the MMCDM model, the grammar-based approach helps to decompose a complex selection problem into several manageable chunks; therefore, an effective multiple criteria decision-making method---Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) could be applied to the process selection at any abstract level. The MMCDM model has been applied in this dissertation on selecting processes, machines, and part families for producing a part in a complex manufacturing environment. It can also be applied on those problems with a great amount of data and many decisions to be made. |
