Implementation of an object-oriented tool for the simulation of manufacturing systems and its application to study the effects of flexibility

Although there is a reasonable number of currently available modelling tools for the analysis and evaluation of flexible manufacturing systems, these models, in general, neglect flexibility. They do not consider that in a flexible manufacturing system there is the possibility of different operation sequences. As a consequence, while flexibility in manufacturing is much ‘in vogue’, the development of models that are able to improve the understanding and consequences of having flexibility is still incipient in the literature. This paper presents work to develop a tool to support the analysis of flexible automation. The tool described is an object-oriented discrete-event simulator, called OOSimFlex, capable of modelling different alternative systems design and analysing a manufacturing system using multiple performance measures under different manufacturing flexibility levels. The paper describes the major theoretical concepts employed for the development of a highly flexible and interactive simulation model environment.