Considerable research effort has been devoted to the development of on-line control strategies for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), to effectively utilize the available flexibility. These control strategies assume real time control conditions that require real timestatus information and real time decisions. This generally requires significant IT investment. Most real world manufacturing systems are not FMS and they employ a partial level of IT support to improve the control decision effectiveness of the shop floor human controllers. The latter often need to cope with status monitoring delays (i.e. information collection, processing and presentation delays) depending on the available IT support. This is retlected by the type and level of computer based information automation and integration employed. Thus on line control decisions in shop floors typically face various types and levels of status monitoring delays called the information delays. The on-line control strategies involve decisions based on the available system status and hence their performance is likely to be affected due to the information delays. Further the control decisions may require finite decision processing times referred to as the decision delays. Many manufacturing systems that employ only partial levels of computerization at the operational levels to support the human decision makers may face such delays. We refer to all such discrete part manufacturing systems that possess flexibility but whose control strategies need to cope with the decision and information delays to exploit the available flexibility as the Semi-Computerized Flexible Manufacturing (SCFM) systems. It is important that the solution providers offer an appropriate type and level of status monitoring capability in SCFM systems to enable a desirable utilization ofthe available flexibility.
Decision Delays, Information Delays, Review Period, Routing Flexibility, Control Decisions, Semi Computerized Flexible Manufacturing System.
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