The development of intelligent decision support tools to aid the design of flexible manufacturing systems

The design of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is an essential but costly process. Although FMS design appears to be an excellent area for applying artificial intelligence (AI) and computer simulation techniques, to date there have been limited investigations on integrating AI with the modular simulation software available for FMS design. In this paper an integrated approach for the automatic design of FMS is reported, which uses simulation and multi-criteria decision-making techniques. The design process consists of the construction and testing of alternative designs using simulation methods. The selection of the most suitable design (based on the multi-criteria decision-making technique, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)) is employed to analyze the output from the FMS simulation models. Intelligent tools (such as expert systems, fuzzy systems and neural networks), are developed for supporting the FMS design process. Active X technique is used for the actual integration of the FMS automatic design process and the intelligent decision support process.