Capacity design in a flexible manufacturing system with limited warehouse capacity and the limited number of pallets

Capacity design problems in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) with a Poisson arrival process and with limited system-capacity are formulated to determine the number of boxes to store arrival jobs in a supplementary warehouse, called the ‘warehouse capacity’, and the numberof pallets available in the FMS. The throughput of the FMS is performed through an approximate closed queueing network model. The limits, and the first- and the second-order properties of the throughput function with respect to the warehouse capacity and the number of pallets available in the FMS are derived and exploited to develop efficient solution methods for making the near-optimal capacity design.