(A) study on a tool provisioning problem in a flexible manufacturing system with an automatic tool transporter

Abstract

In this thesis, we consider a tool provisioning problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) with an automatic tool transporter. The tool provisioning problem is to determine the number of tool copies for each tool type which should be purchased for producing parts. Since too few tools in the system increase tool waiting time and too many tools increase tool purchasing costs, it is important to determine an appropriate number of tool copies for each tool type considering the system performance and tool purchase costs simultaneously. We propose three heuristic algorithms (algorithm 1, algorithm 2 and algorithm 3), which are based on the tool grouping, a bounded variable knapsack problem and greedy search method. To test the performance of the proposed algorithms, computational experiments are done on a number of randomly generated test problem. Results of the computational experiments show that the algorithm 3 gave the better solution than the others.