In: Technical Paper Society of Manufacturing Engineers, pages 1-10. 1990.
Abstract: This paper presents a systematic method, based on a product-oriented approach for the design of any flexible assembly system. The assembly process is first described as a structured set of operations to be carried on the product parts and then as a set of equipment performing these operations. The resulting method divides the process design in two main stages, each of them being supported by an interactive program: the first one determines the assembly plants and the second one defines the structure of the assembly system progressively and transforms it into a Petri net for its simulation. The resulting concurrent structures may be numerically compared from their equipment costs and their temporal performances