Development of a micro manufacturing system and its efficiency evaluation method

This paper first describes the concept of a microfactory and its design basics. The microfactory is a desktop-type miniature manufacturing system consists of miniature machine tools and manipulators. Since the prototyped microfactory was able to perform the whole process of machining parts and assembling them to a miniature ball bearing, it was able to say that it has a significant capability for micro mechanical fabrication. However, the possibility of the microfactory to improve manufacturing efficiencies of micro mechanical fabrications has not been considered enough. In the paper, the author proposes an evaluation method to calculate efficiencies of the system, based on the required time for each process, machine cost, operator's cost and environmental impact measured by energy consumption, using the abovementioned microfactory as an example. Through the analysis the paper tries to evaluate the system efficiency and show the procedure to determine the optimum system configuration. Finally, the paper concludes that a microfactory-like reconfigurable system will be useful in improving productivity, by combined with a proper evaluation method system efficiency.