Production
Today, the requirement of production activity is changing. Once in the times of high economic growth, the demand of consumers was single and simple, but now the demand has very wide range. Then manufacturers should keep various kinds of products in their lineups and should produce the requested product immediately. This indicates that the design of assembly lines adapted to the each feature of products and the configuration of devices according to designed lines are necessary. Traditional manufacturing system by fixed assembly line is suitable for mass production, but it cannot deal with the occasion where the product lineup is modified frequently. For this reason, flexible manufacturing systems in next generation are widely studied.
In this area, we are researching two problems:
In this research, we focus on the assembly among various manufacturing activities. We propose a flexible assembly system which has hierarchical control architecture based on the concept of holon. By this hierarchical architecture, assembly task is automatically decomposed into smaller particles. Communications between the manufacturing devices and the control layer are performed according to contract net protocol. The devices participate in manufacturing activities when they are requested to work by the upper control layer.
In this research, we focus on material handling system. We propose a new material handling system that has flexibility against fluctuation in the amount and the route of transportation, using new transportation module. The new module consists of an AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicle) with a conveyor on its top. This system gains Advantages of both AGV and conveyor.
Fig. 1 Assembly cell with concept of holon Fig. 2 AGV with belt conveyor