Flexible manufacturing cells (FMC) may be considered the most significant development in small-batch manufacturing. Setting-up and operating costs of FMC prove to be the most major hindrance to their large-scale imple...
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Flexible manufacturing cells (FMC) may be considered the most significant development in small-batch manufacturing. Setting-up and operating costs of FMC prove to be the most major hindrance to their large-scale implementation and use, particularly by small and medium size industries. Incompatibilities between the different components constituting the cells and the lack of a unified language/approach to programming and coordinating them are cited as the cause of the complexity of setting up and subsequently operating the cells. In order to eliminate these difficulties, a new philosophy for setting-up, programming and control of FMC has been developed. This paper reports the effort to develop this new unified manufacturing instruction set and its environment, called here "UniSet", its philosophy and some of the components of the UniSet environment. UniSet has been developed as a non-exclusive unified manufacturing instruction set, based on comparisons of the prevailing machine tool and programming primitives. UniSet allows programmers to deal with only one instruction set, if they so desire, in a single coherent environment, rather than numerous machine programming languages. The software system is coded in an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, Smalltalk, and derives its paradigm from the OO philosophy. Test results are also included to demonstrate the applicability of the approach employed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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