PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A LIM-BASED HIGH-SPEED TOOL DELIVERY SYSTEM FOR MACHINING

Material handling provides a major opportunity for productivity improvement in manufacturing systems. The poor performance of the conventional material handling systems, such as conveyors or automated guided vehicles, has led most researchers to focus on opitmal utilization of the material handling system through the design of new scheduling algorithms or control strategies. The low speed of currently available material handling systems is one of the major factors that lead to long process delays and correspondingly large work-in-process inventories common in many manufacturing systems. In this paper, we suggest a new design of material handling systems, driven by a high performance linear induction motor (LIM). The high speed of this LIM-based material handling system distinguishes it from the conventional material handling systems. To evaluate its performance, we have constructed a simulation model where the LIM-based vehicles serve as a tool delivery system in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). We study the performance of this FMS relative to a conventional FMS with an emphasis to investigate the level of flexibility it can provide and the level of tool redundancy it can reduce. Finally, we present many of the tangible and intangible benefits of the LIM-based material handling system in manufacturing considering its performance and economic viability. We show that applying a LIM-based high-speed tool delivery system can improve the performance of FMSs in terms of economy as well as productivity.