A Knowledge-Based System for Material-Handling Selection of Discrete Part Manufacturing
Material handling is one of the production functions that have been the focus of attention for many manufacturing industries especially discrete parts manufacturing. Generally, the design of material handling system can be divided into four phases namely; conceptual design, detailed design, launc...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
2009
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| Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/7333/1/FK_2009_38a.pdf http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/7333/ |
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| Summary: | Material handling is one of the production functions that have been the focus of
attention for many manufacturing industries especially discrete parts manufacturing.
Generally, the design of material handling system can be divided into four phases
namely; conceptual design, detailed design, launching and fully operational. The
focus of this research is on the conceptual design phase. Since there are hundreds of
equipment types and procedures to choose from, the selection activities are usually
complex and difficult. Therefore, quick and appropriate material handling selection
is important in a production system, since it can increase productivity, flexibility of
the manufacturing time and it also reduces cost. Hence, development of a decision support system to aid in the selection of the material handling equipment is a
significant contribution in manufacturing operations.
In this research work, the selection system was developed using Kappa-PC expert
system shell. It uses forward chaining for inferencing. In the forward reasoning stage,
the developed system attempts to deduce a material handling equipment type
recommendation based on user specified requirements. The selections of the material
handling equipment are based on the move attributes and characteristics of material
to be handled, operation requirement and area restriction. The recommendation from
the knowledge-based system is refined through application of simulation modeling
techniques. The simulation was carried out using Arena 9.0 software package. The
material handling selection system assist design engineers in selecting the most
suitable and appropriate material handling equipment type for the task being
considered. The advantages of the developed system are; it considers both selection
and configuration analysis, it can be immediately implemented in factory operations;
it is modular and user friendly. The system was successfully validated through a
case study. The case study was carried out on Sharp Manufacturing Corporation Sdn.
Bhd., in Malaysia. Through the case study, a total of 5.20s of the transfer time and
RM 9.00 per cycle of the transportation cost of the current Sharp Manufacturing
System will be reduced. This result in 72.22 and 75.00 percent of improvement on
the transfer time and transportation cost respectively. By the reduction and
improvement on the transfer time and transportation cost, the efficiency of the
material flow and productivity of the Sharp Manufacturing system will increase and
the production cost will reduce. |
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