9634865 Realff The textile industry in the U.S. has shifted to demand activated manufacturing in response to customer requirements for shorter lead times and wider ranges of products. This project will develop a design methodology to configure textile processing machines into systems that can respond to these new demands, as well as make the best use of capital investment. There are two parts to the proposed technical approach: system design and performance analysis. System design uses mixed integer linear or non-linear programming to choose and configure candidate system elements from standard machines that are available. For performance analysis, discrete event simulation will assess the predicted performance and cost of a textile processing system. The approach will lead to the lowest cost feasible system by making choices like: direct or sectional warping of yarn onto beams, size of a yarn creel, modular or conventional loom, etc. Such a design methodology for equipment configuration is an issue in many types of manufacturing systems, in addition to textiles. In all cases, the issue of quickly reorganizing a manufacturing system to meet changing demands is interesting, realistic, and has a high potential pay-off.
