Performance Analysis of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS)

Abstract The performance of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has a great impact on a manufacturing firm success and the analysis of FMS justifies the high investment cost behind it. As the competition in the global market is growing, manufacturing companies compete not only on product cost and quality but also in time to market. FMS as a highly automated system typically comprised of a set of processing workstations allowing in an integrated manner to react rapidly and economically to production-oriented aspects of an enterprise in order to cope significant changes in its operating environment. This paper analysed the performance of a FMS through manufacturing process modelling and simulation. The modelling of a manufacturing system enables to grasp quickly how the current system is working and to evaluate the proposed process changes before actual decision making, on the other hand, the simulation of the system supports the idea of virtual manufacturing and gives prompt response to the decision maker. Moreover, integration of system dynamic analysis with reliability estimation methods enable engineers to find the most unreliable places in a production process and supports the decision making for reliability improvement of a production system. In this paper elaboration of the graphic simulation model of FMS operation has been described, FMS model parameters have been estimated, and criteria have been defined based on requirements regarding system reliability.