The new concept and structure of the Manufacturing operating system (MOS) can provide the structure for managerial support and help in managerial decision-making. The MOS system can control the complex environment of unstructured decision-making, thus relieving managers from complex tasks. Automated systems are rapidly increasing in different industries and organizations. The current automatic manufacturing systems pose several limitations because they do not consider the systems’ state and goals. The MOS has three main components; data management organizes and manages data used for the system’s operation. The logic management component is responsible for the retrieval, organization, storage, and execution of algorithms used in the system and the interfaces used to aid both the users and controllers. This paper summarizes the article titled “Control and decision support in automatic manufacturing systems” which explains the concept of MOS deeper.
Automatic manufacturing systems are popular in many modern businesses and industries. Most are usually composed of complex process controls where a set of units such as machines are arranged systematically into one unit. Nonetheless, the current systems are faced with various limitations when it comes to providing managerial decision support as the systems cannot handle unstructured decision problems. The current Automatic Manufacturing systems cannot constantly review the changing state of the systems. Thus, computer systems help in deterministic and non-deterministic tasks such as scheduling, inventory control, and capacity planning.
A Computerized Integrated System (CIM) may be necessary to solve this problem. Show that Computerized Maintenance Repair Systems (CMMS) are more reliable than traditional systems.
The complex environments of the systems limit the Persons who handle these systems, and hence the tasks are delegated to the decision support systems. These systems are called MOS and control and guide all facets of the manufacturing process. This system is applied in various areas, including supply chain management, quality control, scheduling, and maintaining budgets. Unlike humans, these systems provide consistency, give data-oriented results, streamline communications, and unify the company culture. The simple concept followed by the MOS is the plan, do check, act, and steadily improve the performance. MOS is significant to the course under study because it enables the management to detect and correct mistakes before they become serious hence helping prevention of losses.
The general architecture of a MOS model consists of the following parts. First, there is the user interface where users and controller give their input and receive their output. Then there is the MOS operating system, where information is processed. The database section deals with reference data, operational data, and decision logic (Nof et al., 1980). Lastly is the interface with the process controllers that help the system run efficiently. This article under review did get into the scope of the architecture of the MOS model. Four primitives: operators, operands, paths, and conditions were used in the paper to model the manufacturing system. An operator is an active element, such as a person who performs or indicates which action to perform. An operant indicates what items to apply the actions and the ones to avoid. Paths can be defined as the connectors between operators and operands (Nof et al., 1980). Conditions in the MOS are defined as relevant operators’ attributes that enable the activities. MOS can be modeled using Petri nets which are directed bipartite graphs that two different elements called places and transitions depicted as circles and triangles. Petri nets are handy in depicting asynchronous activities associated with MOS. Petri nets are also famous for modeling structures of hardware mechanisms in complex computer systems. The modeling used in the paper under review was a technique named Evaluation nets (E-net), which uses one particular variation of the Petri nets.
The control procedure of the MOS in the paper under review had four significant steps. First was the identification of operators. The operators that affected the status of the system are identified. Then all the possible actions performed by the affected operators are identified. Then the decision logic and implementation were done. The second step was to retrieve all possible actions and decision logic made. Thirdly, the action was sorted out, and recommendations for actions were set. If there is no recommendation, nothing was done. If there was one, it is implemented. If there is more than one, the fourth step is taken. The fourth step entails a higher-level
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