| Abstract: | The decisions made by manufacturing engineers have to be flavoured by the value system of the times. The rapid change in value systems caused by the human/environmental revolution, will bring about the beginning of a new epoch in manufacturing. This will make old ways of doing things obsolete, but also create new possibilities. Therefore, manufacturing industry may change to a new pattern better adapted to the new environments.In order to meet this challenge in the Norweigan society, an industrial concept, a cell concept, has been developed by the Production Engineering Laboratory NTH-SINTEF. Vital parts of the cell concept have been tested in a full scale pilot plant, in which a variety of diesel engine parts are machined.Part programming, machine loading and scheduling in the cell together with the cell control functions, are performed computer aided, using a three level computer hierarchy. |
