American Machinist Automated Manufacturing

Focusing on the design and implementation of computer-based automatic machine tools, David F. Noble challenges the idea that technology has a life of its own. Technology has been both a convenient scapegoat and a universal solution, serving to disarm critics, divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities that continue to beset America. This provocative study of the postwar automation of the American metal-working industry—the heart of a modern industrial economy—explains how dominant institutions like the great corporations, the universities, and the military, along with the ideology of modern engineering shape, the development of technology. Noble shows how the system of "numerical control," perfected at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and put into general industrial use, was chosen over competing systems for reasons other than the technical and economic superiority typically advanced by its promoters. Numerical control took shape at an MIT laboratory rather than in a manufacturing setting, and a market for the new technology was created, not by cost-minded producers, but instead by the U. S. Air Force. Competing methods, equally promising, were rejected because they left control of production in the hands of skilled workers, rather than in those of management or programmers. Noble demonstrates that engineering design is influenced by political, economic, managerial, and sociological considerations, while the deployment of equipment—illustrated by a detailed case history of a large General Electric plant in Massachusetts—can become entangled with such matters as labor classification, shop organization, managerial responsibility, and patterns of authority. In its examination of technology as a human, social process, Forces of Production is a path-breaking contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon in American society.

The text is designed for engineering students at the senior undergraduate level and first-year students at graduate level, and professionals (R&D engineers in the industry and factory managers). The authors offer a unique effort in presenting a unified and systematic treatment of various modeling methodologies and analysis techniques for performance evaluation of automated manufacturing systems. The text begins with an overview of automated manufacturing systems, and then provides a clear and comprehensive discussion of three principal analytical modeling paradigms: Markov Chains, Queues and Queuing Networks, and Petri Nets. Salient Features • Present the first ever treatment of the mathematical modeling of manufacturing systems. • Offers a unified study of principal analytical modeling paradigms for automated manufacturing systems. • Discusses many recent research contributions in the area of modeling of automated manufacturing systems. • Discusses many recent research contributions in the area of modeling of automated manufacturing systems, including deadlock modeling, transient analysis, queuing network approximations, Petri Net modeling, and integrated analytical modeling. • Provides a large number of exercises and problems.