Article Title:
Minimization of the Number of Tool Magazine Setups on Automated Machines: A Lagrangean Decomposition Approach
Author(s): Meltem Denizel
Source: Operation Research, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar. – Apr., 2003), pp. 309-320
SYNOPSIS:
With a competitive environment, manufacturing companies should be flexible in terms of performance and competitiveness. The consumers nowadays required more of product customization and short product life cycles. With these demands, manufacturing companies are force to process a high variety of products in low volumes and with short delivery times. In lieu of these, manufacturing process should have the efficiency of a line flow and flexibility of a job shop.
One way to cope with these kind of needs are through the automated manufacturing environments. These consist of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. CNC Machines have the capability of processing several manufacturing operations and provide the required flexibility in an efficient manner. It is usually use in the metal – working industry. It is equipped with a limited – capacity tool magazine and can automatically change tools between operations in slight time. However, during the changing of tool in the magazine, it must be loaded carefully to best utilize the machine’s flexibility. Set – up time of loading tool magazine is considered long and accounting for a lot of percentage in production time. Because of this, there is a need to reduce the number of tool – magazine setups in order also to reduce the machine processing times. This need is an important and vital problem in automated manufacturing.
The paper addresses the said problem. It described the problem as follows. Consider a set of parts that have immediate production requirements on one group of identical machines. Processing each part requires a set of cutting tools and different parts may have a subset