• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.19 no.39
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• pp.63-73
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• 1996

With the success of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), flexible assembly systems (FASs) have been developed to automate factories further. As in a cellular FMS, a cellular FAS is considered as the most flexible and feasible assembly system configuration Because of the differences between manufacturing and assembly operation, the logic of cell formation and cell layout between a FMS and a FAS is not the same. Since the time for assembly operation is usually relatively short, the transfer time is thus very crucial for the performance of assembly systems. Therefore in assembly systems it is important to reduce the transfer time by sequencing operations efficiently and arranging machines like the sequences. The network-type layout is not only feasible for the machine arrangement based on operation sequences, but it has also layout flexibility. Therefore it is a reasonable layout configuration for cellular FASs. This paper presents a method for the cell layout based on the network-type layout in a cellular FAS design.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.160-170
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• 2008

This paper proposes a mathematical model for converting conveyor assembly line to cellular manufacturing in complex production environments. Complex production environments refer to the situations with multi-products, variant demand, different batch sizes and the worker abilities varying with work stations and products respectively. The model proposed in this paper aims to determine (1) how many cells should be formatted; (2) how many workers should be assigned in each cell; (3) and how many workers should be rested in shortened conveyor line when a conveyor assembly line should be converted, in order to optimize system performances which are defined as the total throughput time and total labor power. We refer the model to a new production system. Such model can be used as an evaluation tool in the cases of (i) when a company wants to change its production system (usually a belt conveyor line) to a new one (including cell manufacturing); (ii) when a company wants to evaluate the performance of its converted system. Simulation experiments based on the data collected from the previous documents are used to estimate the marginal impact that each factor change has had on the estimated performance improvement resulting from the conversion.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.93-100
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• 2013

Mixed model production system means that various products are manufactured alternately in a line, and it has become a popular system in the era of multi-product small-quantity production. However, in the mixed model production system using flow line, the unbalance among stations is not inevitable because the workloads of stations cannot be the same. Thus, flow line system has been replaced to cellular manufacturing system for reducing the loss of waiting due to the unbalance of stations. In this paper, we introduce the simulation case study of an automated welding line which produces the parts of excavator. The factory has considered replacing the mixed model flow line to the cellular manufacturing system based on FMC concept. The increase of production quantity is estimated about 26.7%, and the lead time is reduced more than 55%. Furthermore sensitivity analyses are conducted considering the changes of product-mix.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2000.11a
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• pp.334-338
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• 2000

One of the major drawbacks of the existing facility layout methods is that most of them were developed based on pre-defined cost functions, and therefore fail to cope with the dynamic aspects of modern manufacturing systems. Another drawback is that due to the poor representation capability of the block diagrams, they are not able to convey the sufficient information needed by facility designers. In this paper, a system for solving facility layout problem considering these matters in cellular manufacturing environment is proposed and implemented using GA approach with embedded simulation module and virtual reality technologies.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.580-589
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• 2014

Demands for automation in the cell production process of IT products are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In particular, the dual-arm robot has drawn attention as a solution because it has a flexibility and works similarly to humans. In this paper, we propose an automation system for cellular phone packing processes using two dual-arm robots. Applied robots are designed with specifications to meet the requirements of cellular phone packing jobs. In addition, a robotic cell production system is proposed by applying a method of task allocation for efficient packing of cellular phones. Specifically, a task is assigned to reduce takt-time and to avoid collision between two robots. Finally, we discuss some experimental results that include the packing job of five unit boxes with seven kinds of accessories.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.559-569
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• 1998

Cellular manufacturing system (CMS) has been recognized as an alternative to improve manufacturing productivity in conventional batch-type manufacturing systems through reducing set-up times, work-in-process inventories and throughput times by means of group technology. Most of the studies on the design of CMS assumed that each part has a unique process plan, and that its demand is known as a deterministic value despite of the probabilistic nature of the real world problems. This study suggests an approach for designing CMS, considering both alternative process plans and uncertain demand. A mathematical model is presented to show how to minimize the expected amortized and operating costs satisfying these two relaxations. Four heuristic algorithms are developed based on tabu search which is well suited for getting an optimal or near-optimal solution. Example problems are carried out to illustrate the heuristic algorithms and each of them is compared with the deterministic counterpart.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.23 no.61
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• pp.137-146
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• 2000

One of the problems faced in implementing cellular manufacturing systems is machine-part group formation. This paper proposes machine-part grouping algorithms based on Self-Organizing Map(SOM) neural networks and K-Means algorithm in cellular manufacturing systems. Although the SOM spreads out input vectors to output vectors in the order of similarity, it does not always find the optimal solution. We rearrange the input vectors using SOM and determine the number of groups. In order to find the number of groups and grouping efficacy, we iterate K-Means algorithm changing k until we cannot obtain better solution. The results of using the proposed approach are compared to the best solutions reported in literature. The computational results show that the proposed approach provides a powerful means of solving the machine-part grouping problem. The proposed algorithm Is applied by simple calculation, so it can be for designer to change production constraints.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.22 no.49
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• pp.67-76
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• 1999

This research presents the relationship among machining time, cycle time and demand rate in a cellular manufacturing system. The manufacturing cell produces part families by automated machines. This paper discusses the cases of increasing demand rate in an existing cell and designing cell based on the demand rate. This research developed an algorithm for decision making such as cycle time, machines and workers in order to minimize the total machine capacity and the number of workers for any given demand rate. The proposed algorithm was successfully applied for the design and operation of cell manufacturing with a good result.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.173-186
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• 1999

Recently many firms are introducing the cellular manufacturing system(CMS) as a means of achieving manufacturing efficiencies. However, most of the research on CMS was mainly for determining the cell formation problems. Since the goal of the CMS is not only a increase production efficiencies, but also to enhance the competitive stength of a firm, it would be reasonable to assume CMS as a business reengineering module rather than an independent technique. The purpose of this study is to align the CMS with reengineering, to present an integrated methodology for constructing the CMS, and to apply the CMS to a firm and verify it. The paper concludes with a brief description of the lessons learend by the CMS project and the limitations of the research are described.

• IE interfaces
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.189-196
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• 1997

This paper presents a cell formation approach for a cellular manufacturing system to minimize the inter-cell moves considering operation sequences. Two new factors are introduced: (1)flow-similarity(FS) for integrating direct/indirect inter-machine flow and similarity (2)machine cell-part moves (CPM) for exactly computing inter-cell moves. FS is used for combining machines and CPM is used for assigning the parts to the preliminary machine cells. In addition, we develop an aggregated heuristic algorithm to form manufacturing machine cells and assign the parts to those cells based on these concepts. We use performance criterion called total inter-cell moves(TICM), which is the total material flow between internal cells and external cells. Results of computational tests on a number of randomly generated test problems show that the suggested heuristic is superior to existing methods.