Chaos in a real flexible manufacturing system: case of a cell

This article presents work in the area of complexity in manufacturing systems and more specially in the area of chaos in manufacturing systems. We show that, under some working conditions, a real production system can have a chaotic behaviour. We apply here two different but complementary approaches : the first one is an intuitive characterisation and the second one is based on non-linear dynamic system theory. The first approach detects in concrete terms the effects of chaos on manufacturing systems, while the second proves the existence of chaos in a real case.