The GRAI Integrated Method: a Technico- Economical Methodology to Design Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Managing manufacturing taking in account objectives coming from commercial constraints such as flexibility, quality, etc. makes todays industrial systems tremendously complex. Thus, designing such industrial systems leads to use structured methods in order to get finally a system working as expected at the beginning of the project. For this purpose, many methods are currently proposed. However, one of the main lacks of all these methods is that they propose no tool to evaluate during the project the technico-economical opportunities of the future system. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present an integrated methodology to design CIM systems including a technico-economical tool supporting design choices in order to improve performances of the future manufacturing system.