The flexible turning cell developed at CETIM has enabled us, among other things, to investigate how the movement of workpieces could be organized in flexible production cells.

The very design of flexible cells leads to the following questions about the manufacturing process to be considered: – type of product, – type of operational side, – type of management/control, – type of data transmission.

These questions are answered by calling upon group technology for both the product and operational sides, and upon simulation to define precisely the operational side, and the type of management/control and data transmission system to be used.

For simple cells (i.e. those with few work-stations) the system can be analyzed in detail without resorting to simulation. Thus equipment limitations such as those set by robot control can be taken into account to analyze the possibilities to interlink numerous different paths.

With this approach simpler real-time operation can be implemented. It also permits handling operations on different types of workpieces (i.e. of different shape and sequence) simultaneously.