Effective Utilization of Industrial Robots—A Job and Skills Analysis Approach

The comparative abilities and limitations of industrial robots and humans are reviewed. This comparison leads to the development of a robot oriented job and skills analysis method with a two-fold objective: 1) to optimize a robot's task-performance, and 2) to guide the specification of the appropriate robot for given tasks. An example of water pump assembly by a robot is used to illustrate the proposed method and its usefulness.     

Autonomy and viability-measures for agent-based manufacturing systems

An Agent-Based Manufacturing System (ABMS), represented as a model of future manufacturing systems, is introduced in this article. In an ABMS, computerized agents are autonomous and working collaboratively through the regulation of structured dialogues. The autonomy functions of an agent are demonstrated by four internal functions: internal resource management, a reflexivity mechanism, a goal adjustment mechanism, and collaboration management. The four functions assist an agent in interacting with other agents and with the environment and to adjust itself to the situation in the dynamic environment. Agents are similar to living systems. Based on the concept of living systems, autonomy and viability at the agent level are proposed and defined as new measures for manufacturing systems. A theory of coexistence and parasitism of ABMS is developed to identify the coexistent and parasitic characteristics of ABMS. Applications of the theory to real cases are also illustrated. Finally, a road map for the future research of distributed, collaborative manufacturing organizations is shown, based on the ABMS model developed.     

Cooperative production switchover coordination for the real-time order acceptance decision

This research addresses a cooperative production coordination method to maximise acceptance rates of customer orders. Accepting a new customer order may result in conflicts in generating or executing the production plans of given, committed orders. These conflicts can be prevented by adaptively modifying the production plans of the committed orders without violating their due dates. By switching the production priority rules of the committed orders, the production capacity can be extended during a specific time period, and this extended capacity can be considered to determine the acceptability of the new order. Demand and production capacity fluctuations have been examined for the validation of the proposed methods. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods increase order acceptance and capacity utilisation rates by over 10–15% on average for variable order quantities and production capacities compared with fixed production methods. These results imply that the proposed methods are efficient in overcoming market fluctuation and production uncertainty.