PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MATERIAL HANDLING SYSTEM IN FMS

Abstract

The introduction of flexible automation production systems is giving a considerable push to the realization of different systems of production planning & control. As the high investment necessary for the realization of these plants makes it extremely important that their throughout is exploited to the full. Since FMS involve high capital costs, significant attention has been paid to improving system efficiency via production scheduling. As a flexible computer controlled factory wide transporter, an AGV has become a popular material handling tool. Most of the AGV system research has revolved around AGV allocation & dispatching strategies. The immense flexibility of an AGV system makes the task of controlling the AGV system an interesting one. The issue of controlling AGV system includes dispatching, routing and scheduling: Dispatching is the most important activity of production control. The AGV dispatching problem is, to assign vehicles to transport demands to achieve some predefined objectives of the manufacturing shop. The dispatching should be, such as to insure proper vehicle utilization. The dispatching decisions of AGV are taken by considering several dispatching rules. These rules are carefully selected, since they can affect the material flow, congestion in the network, throughput and manufacturing lead time. With the development and growing use of integrated manufacturing systems such as FMS, robotic cells and JIT manufacturing, simulation is becoming a tool that is needed by an increasing number of engineers because it is the main tool for designing and subsequently assessing the operation of such systems. Whenever a system possess dynamic nature or which can compete for resources, the simulation is likely to be needed to investigate both the balance of resources and also effective use of resources. The present work is formulated to study the performance of material handling system i.e. automated guided .vehicles in a FMS. A simulation program is developed in C++ language which calculates the performance of a specific FMS model. The performance is calculated on the basis of various combinations of AGV dispatching rules. The program is user oriented i.e. parameters are entered by the user and the output