Measurement of processing flexibility in flexible manufacturing cells

Abstract This paper proposes an approach to a quantitative evaluation of processing flexibility in flexible manufacturing cells. Factors that may influence flexibility are surveyed and two numerical indices incorporating some of these factors are developed. A simple index is based on the existence of interrelations between operations and machines. A more complex index requires knowledge of processing times. Extensive experiments were carried out to test the correlation between these indices and the ratio of average achieved throughput at partial flexibility to that total flexibility (i.e., if all operations could be carried out on all machines). Results indicated that the proposed flexibility measures provide an excellent prediction of the influence of machine-operation possibilities on throughput performance.

[1]  Suresh P. Sethi,et al.  Flexibility in manufacturing: A survey , 1990 .

[2]  Yash P. Gupta,et al.  Flexibility of manufacturing systems: Concepts and measurements , 1989 .

[3]  Günter Spur,et al.  Advanced manufacturing systems , 1988 .

[4]  Hirofumi Matsuo,et al.  A bottleneck-based beam search for job scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system , 1989 .

[5]  David D. Yao,et al.  Flexible Parts Routing in Manufacturing Systems , 1990 .

[6]  S. C. Sarin,et al.  Scheduling parts in an FMS , 1986 .

[7]  Percy H. Brill,et al.  On measures of flexibility in manufacturing systems , 1989 .

[8]  Young K. Son,et al.  Economic measure of productivity, quality and flexibility in advanced manufacturing systems , 1987 .

[9]  Miryam Barad,et al.  Flexibility in manufacturing systems: definitions and Petri net modelling , 1988 .

[10]  M. Tombak,et al.  Flexibility and FMS: an empirical analysis , 1988 .

[11]  Diwakar Gupta,et al.  A framework for understanding flexibility of manufacturing systems , 1989 .

[12]  John A. Buzacott,et al.  Flexibility and decision making , 1990 .

[13]  Moshe M. Barash,et al.  A grammatical approach to routing flexibility in large manufacturing systems , 1988 .

[14]  Dragutin M. Zelenović,et al.  Flexibility—a condition for effective production systems , 1982 .

[15]  Sten-Olof Gustavsson,et al.  Flexibility and productivity in complex production processes , 1984 .

[16]  Vinod Kumar,et al.  Measurement of loading and operations flexibility in flexible manufacturing systems: An information-theoretic approach , 1988 .

[17]  N. Slack.  Flexibility as a Manufacturing Objective , 1983 .

[18]  Donald Gerwin,et al.  An agenda for research on the flexibility of manufacturing processes , 1987 .

[19]  Vinod Kumar,et al.  Entropic measures of manufacturing flexibility , 1987 .

[20]  Anthony Vannelli,et al.  A method for finding minimal bottle-neck cells for grouping part-machine families† , 1986 .