A MODEL MANAGEMENT-SYSTEMS APPROACH TO MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS-DESIGN

Manufacturing systems design involves the solution of a complex series of interrelated problems. This complexity will increase in the future as manufacturing practices change to meet increased global competitio n. Research within manufacturing systems design has mainly been focuse d on finding improved models for solving particular problems, or exten ding existing modeling techniques. This has resulted in numerous model ing tools being available to support manufacturing systems design. How ever, little research work has been carried out into consolidating the existing theories and models. As a result, a large body of this work has not been applied in industry. Model management has evolved as a re search area which investigates methods for storing, modifying, and man ipulating models. This article describes a prototype model management system for manufacturing systems design. The objective here is not to develop ''another'' decision support system for manufacturing design, but to illustrate, through the development of a prototype system, a nu mber of key ideas of how concepts from the area of model management sy stems can be used to support manufacturing systems design. The prototy pe model management system utilizes the structured modeling framework and uses an extended version of the structured modeling language. An i mportant aspect of the prototype model management system is the incorp oration of the model development task, thus allowing the system to be easily updated and adapted. The prototype system was evaluated using a range of queueing network models for manufacturing systems design.