Abstract
In the FMS of next generation, its system configuration is to be of modular type, in which the basic module is that of FMC. This FMC enables the FMS technology to be available for town and medium-size industries. To cope with such trends surrounding the FMC, it is now required of establishing a design theory of special-purpose FMC and also a standardization method of FMC. In this paper, thus, the similarity evaluation method of the FMC for metal cutting has been investigated to propose a classification method of FMC. The similarity evaluation proposed here puts its main stress on the system configuration, especially on the characteristics of the system compnent and work flow pattern, and to enable the evaluation procedure to be simplified, the FMC is represented with the directed graph. Through some trial applications, it can be verified that the proposed method is reliable and effective from the practical point of view.
