A Cellular Manufacturing Approach to the CompositeManufacturing

摘要

A major obstacle in the way of market growth of composite products is their relatively highrnproduction cost. This problem is intensified, especially nowadays, when manufacturers are striving tornretain their market demand and regain competitive advantage by satisfying their customers throughrnincreasing product variety. Higher variety in general slows down the production rate and increasesrnthe production cost. Cellular manufacturing is a way to gain higher product variety whilernmaintaining the volume and reducing the cost. So far, there has not been considerable attention paidrnto the application of cellular manufacturing to composite manufacturing. A major reason of thatrnwould be the relatively low production volume of the composite products. With increase in productionrnvolume of some composite products and their popularity in various areas such as automotivernindustry, the opportunity to adopt cellular manufacturing approach in composite manufacturing isrnappealing. This can reduce the cost of medium variety/medium or high volume of composite productsrnin such industries as automotive and some other consumer market products. Compositernmanufacturing systems, however, are different from other manufacturing systems due to theirrnparticular methods of manufacturing. This paper studies the properties of composite products in arncellular manufacturing environment and deals with the characteristics of composite products in arnmanufacturing cell. A new way for CF, which is appropriate for composite manufacturing, will alsornbe introduced.