Flexible manufacturing systems in Japan—an overview

FMS was born in the latter half of 1960 as a means to improve productivity of small and medium volume production. Since then a number of FM systems have been installed in Japan. Recently comparatively more applications of FMS can be found in high volume production than in small and medium volume production, simply because FM systems become more effective when they are applied to large volume production. This paper seeks to give an overview of FMS in Japan from the historical point of view of rationalization, and presents current developments of FM systems for machining and integrated FM systems. To deal with the strategic aspect of FMS in Japan, required various types of flexibility are reviewed first. Then, some examples of different kinds of FM systems are given. And finally, this paper discusses the problems of under what circumstances what FMS should be developed and how the resultant FMS should be evaluated.