Improvements in the optimization of flexible manufacturing cells modelled with discrete event dynamics systems: Application to a real factory problem

Resum

Modeling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems has been one of the main research topics dealt with by researchers in the last decades. The modeling paradigm chosen can be in many cases a key decision that can improve or give an added value to the example modeling task. Here, the modeling tasks are represented by one of the mostly used one in the academia, the Petri Net paradigm, and in particular the Stochastic Petri Net models. These models constructed will be used to optimize the performance measures that could be interesting for the production systems. The production indicators used here are related with the productivity of the systems and its efficiency in the production. We have added here and extra element to the optimization problem that is related with the energy consumption during the productive process. This will add an extra value to the actual scenario, introducing energy efficiency terms and information into the models and into the optimization process. These productivity and energy consumption measures could be included into an optimization process by changing a certain number of parameters into the model. A two phase optimization process has been applied to the real example we have considered and an improvement of this two phase methodology has been applied, comparing these results with the original two phase method to check whether which approach is more appropriate. Previous results obtained for this systems are improved by this new piece of research.