A PRACTICAL FUZZY DIGRAPH MODEL FOR MODELING MANUFACTURING FLEXIBILITY

There are many approaches in the literature to model and quantify manufacturing flexibility. Most of these models were developed to quantify several aspects of manufacturing flexibility like machine flexibility, routing flexibility, mix flexibility, volume flexibility, etc. This is mainly due to the fact that developing a generic model, which can be used to measure different types of flexibilities, is not straightforward. Recently, a generic flexibility measure, which is based on digraphs and permanent index, was proposed by the author. The main difficulty with that model like in all other flexibility models is the inability to collect precise data for computing the flexibility. In order to overcome this difficulty, a practical fuzzy linguistic approach is incorporated into the previous digraph model in this article. The extended fuzzy digraph model is explained in detail through an example in the present article.