Rationalizing Tool Selection in a Flexible Manufacturing System for Sheet-Metal Products

Substantial simplification of existing processes and designs may be required before the potential benefits of modern manufacturing technology can be realized. This paper analyzes implementation problems associated with a flexible system that produces flat sheet-metal parts with interior holes. The paper makes three main contributions. First, we formulate the problem of selecting tooling and design standards as an optimization model and demonstrate that the model yields insight by applying it to one manufacturer's problem, thereby reducing substantially the required tooling. Second, we show that the model has a totally balanced constraint matrix, and hence, there are polynomial time algorithms for various versions of the problem. Third, we provide new algorithms with substantially improved performance bounds for two important versions of the problem.