A part release method considering tool scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems

A recent trend in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) is to utilize the identical versatile machines with fast tool delivery devices. Unlike a conventional FMS where parts are fed to the machines with the required tools, tools are acquired from other machines using a tool delivery system and parts can be finished on the same machine in these FMS. Therefore it is more important problem to plan tool flow using tool delivery system in these FMS rather than part flow in conventional FMS. According to the existing study, in FMS 20–30 percent of the total management cost is the cost related with tools and it is possible to reduce the tool inventory by 40 percent using efficient tool allocation. In this study, in FMS under dynamic tool allocation strategy, a new method of part release considering tool flow at the stage of part release is proposed. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed part release it is compared with other part release through simulation experiments. Performance measures in these experiments are the throughput and the number of tardy parts.