Boots – shoes – and leggings
Patent
1991-04-10
1993-08-17
Smith, Jerry
Boots, shoes, and leggings
364469, 364478, 364131, 364138, G06F 1521, G05B 1502, B23Q 4108, B23P 2100
Patent
active
052375080
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a production control system comprising production facilities and physical distribution facilities, and particularly to a control and management system of a unit assembling line.
BACKGROUND ART
In recent years, in the field of electronic devices, products have become compact, light weight, and multifunction. Printed board units for forming the electronic devices have also become highly integrated. These facts have increased the number of parts to be mounted, reduced the size of each part, and complicated the entire process. It is difficult, therefore, to manually assemble the parts. To cope with this, factories have been introducing many automatic parts inserters and mounters. Due to increasing personnel expenses in the factories, there is a need of efficiently operating the introduced expensive equipment with as little manual intervention as possible. Since the needs of customers are diverse and since life cycles of some goods are short, the factories are required to produce many kinds of articles in small quantities within short delivery periods. These factors prevents the unmanned and efficient operation of the factories.
Conventionally, various attempts have been made to provide various apparatus disposed in a production line for each kind of product to realize unmanned and efficient operation. No system, however, has yet been realized that provides unmanned and efficient operation or the line as a whole and for many kinds of products.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
In view of the above-mentioned problems, an object of the present invention is to realize a line controlling and managing system that can meet the requirements of producing many kinds of products in small quantities within a short delivery period, improving the productivity of a product control system, and realizing unmanned operation of a line.
To achieve the object, the present invention provides a production control system comprising a plurality of facilities including parts mounters for processing a plurality of products through a plurality of processes, a plurality of cell controllers for controlling the facilities, a line control system for centrally controlling all the cell controllers, and a transporting means for transporting the products between the facilities under the control of the line control system. The line control system prepares a schedule of a relatively short period out of a schedule of a relatively long period, and, considering in real time processing conditions of the products on a line and actually occurring events, prepares a detailed execution schedule, and according to the prepared execution schedule, controls the cell controllers, parts mounters, and transporting means.
It is preferable that the line control system be able to analyze alarms from the facilities detected by the cell controller as actually occurring events. If the result of analysis of the alarm indicates that restoration is impossible or will take a long time, the line control system exclude the troubled facilities to automatically reschedule and prepare an execution schedule. If the analysis of the alarm cannot indicate the cause of the trouble, the line control system provides an indication asking an operator to reschedule.
It is preferable that, when preparation for changing process conditions between processes takes a predetermined time, the line control system comprises a priority ranking table and a sorting table. The line control system determines a total working time of products fed for each process, ranks the processes with priorities in order of the total working time, and stores the priorities in the priority ranking table. Also, the line control system groups the products according to process conditions in each of the ranked processes, and stores the grouped products in the sorting table. The products groups or the products grouped in the sorting table are arranged in such a way that adjacent ones of the groups or the products may have as nearly identical process condition as possible.
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patent: 4901218 (1990-02-01), Cornwell
patent: 4958292 (1990-09-01), Kaneko et al.
patent: 5014208 (1991-05-01), Wolfson
patent: 5056028 (1991-10-01), Ohta et al.
patent: 5084829 (1992-01-01), Kato
patent: 5126932 (1992-06-01), Wolfson et al.
European Search Report, The Hague, Search Completed Jan. 3, 1992.
Furukawa Satomi
Ohide Hiroshi
Seki Yuuji
Suzuki Shozo
Fujitsu Limited
Gordon Paul
Smith Jerry
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