Effects of Dispatching and Routeing Decisions on the Performance of a Flexible Manufacturing System

This paper is concerned with the effects of dispatching and routeing decisions on the performance of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Three routeing policies, no alternative routeings, alternative routeings dynamic, and alternativerouteings planned are first considered with four dispatching rules with infinite buffer capacity. However, in real-life, the size of the local buffers in FMSs may be limited by the size of the part types. Therefore, further experiments to investigate the above three routeing policies with the four dispatching rules with finite buffer capacity are also conducted in order to study the impact of limited buffer capacity on system performance. In addition, the effect of changing part mix ratios is discussed with both infinite and finite buffer capacity. The performance measures considered are makespan, average machine utilisation, average flow-time, and average delay at local input buffers. The simulation results indicate that for infinite buffer capacity, the alternative routeings planned policy, combined with the shortest total processing time dispatching rule, gives the best results for all the above performance measures. For finite buffer capacity, the alternative routeings dynamic policy gives the best results in three performance measures, except for average delay at local input buffers. Further, the effect of changing part mix ratios is not significant.