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Abstract:
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Capability to offer the customer what is needed has become an essential quality for enterprises in order to survive in such a more and more competitive environment as today. With computers arrival, automation, design, management all production technologies have been strongly improved, becoming faster and much more accurate than years before, so that manufacturing science can now reach renewed objectives. Computer-Integrated Manufacturing is leading to factories in which human work focuses only on inspection and management tasks, while costs are reduced, production rates increase, and meanings of seconds and money are merging. In the above frame, stopping production for renewing machinery according to each particular change on market´s requirements is completely inadmissible for the modern enterprise: Versatile manufacturing processes are highly recommended solutions. Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) have been born with the purpose. FMS are modern machinery that collect the demanded flexibility features of nowadays market life. Devices are now divided into sub-modules that can be easy and quickly reprogrammed for obtaining a new product, or even replaced by another modules of the same kind with purpose of a rapid reconfiguration. The present work was an example of how an existing FMS can be modelled and improved in a graphical environment. |