| During the 1970s and 1980s, the relative competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing industry declined. Though manufacturing firms understand the serious ongoing problems in international competition, they are reluctant to invest in Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) or have done so in an inefficient, inflexible manner by using the new technologies to manufacture products using methodologies developed in the fifties and sixties. Highly rigid management in firms which have invested in AMT has hampered them from tapping the flexible manufacturing capabilities available in AMT.;Some researchers attribute this lack of impetus to invest in AMT, or the failure of the investment to poor comprehension of new technologies by managers and senior executives. Chang (89) considers the lack of a comprehensive theoretical model of these systems to be the root cause of this problem. The deficiency of existing languages in modeling AMS has hindered understanding of AMS. Thus, sub-optimal deployment of resources in the industry, and skepticism on long-term investment have taken a strong foothold.;In this dissertation, we addressed the primary issue of developing a comprehensive, theoretical modeling language to capture the nuances of AMS. Adopting a structured methodology, we specified four characteristics for a good modeling language--functionality, validity, implementability, and performance; we identified the requirements of a good modeling language for AMS; and we reviewed existing languages to understand the current state of development of AMS modeling languages. As proposed languages did not satisfy all these requirements, we proposed and formally defined a language, ROOTS, which drew upon the underpinnings of three paradigms, object-orientation, temporal logic and rules. We provided a modeling methodology and indicated how the primitives of ROOTS satisfy the requirements for an AMS modeling language.;We developed appropriate evaluation metrics to measure functionality and studied two problems and their implementation in ROOTS and MODSIM, a well-known modeling language. This comparison demonstrated that ROOTS provides more functionality than MODSIM, thus making it more elegant, easier to both use and maintain. We also provided a plausible argument that ROOTS is valid and implementable and discussed the development of ROOTS. Finally, we evaluated the research and identified directions for future research. |
