[nt J Adv Manuf Technol (1989) 4:207-226 9 1989 Springer-Verlag London Limited The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology A TOOL-REGULATION AND BALANCING SYSTEM FOR TURNING CENTRES P. Maropoulos and S. Hinduja Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK The tool-balancing system described in this paper regulates the selected tools .for the machining of a certain component on a turning centre and optimises the tool-changing strategy on a machining-cost basis. The regulation of the tools represents a correlation between the total number of tools selected and the available tool positions on the machine tool. When there are free tool positions on the turret, duplicates of the high-wear tools can be used in order to reduce ttle number of interruptions for tool changing. When the number of tools is greater than the number of turret positions, some tools are automaticall.v replaced by others which are alread,v being used Jbr different operations and which offer geometrical suitability and compatible performance. Further, the tool-changing strategy is optimised by modifying the optimum tool life and~or the cutting data. The system has been successfully tested for a variety of applications and it has resuhed in increased productivity and machine- tool utilisation. Keywords: Automatic tool selection; Condition monitoring; Machine-tool utilisation; Optimisation; Tool-balancing system; Turning centre 1. Introduction The efficiency of a tool-management system is a major concern in any modern manufacturing environment. The first step towards comprehensive tool management is the implementation of an automatic tool-selection (ATS) module [1], which supplies the minimum-machining-cost tool or set of tools Accepted for publication: 17 November 1988