Tool management and job allocation in flexible machining cells .1. Work-oriented strategies

In many flexible machining cells, total priority is given to meeting a scheduled list of work orders. The management of the tooling resource required to process these work schedules is also important. This paper presents and investigates strategies for tool management and job allocation in such a demand-driven system, and are termed work oriented. These generic strategies are described, forecasting the required level of tool exchange activity at individual machines according to different sets of issue and return rules. A computational study using industrial data has been conducted to assess the effectiveness of the strategies over a range of different system characteristics and under the influence of two job allocation rules. The model, data and range of parameters are discussed and results are presented and compared. Conclusions are drawn regarding the success of the study, the nature of the data used and the relative performance of the strategies.