An efficient method to determine the optimal configuration of a flexible manufacturing system

A frequently encountered design issue for a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is to find the lowest cost configuration, i.e. the number of resources of each type (machines, pallets,...), which achieves a given production rate. In this paper, an efficient method to determine this optimal configuration is presented. The FMS is modelled as a closed queueing network. The proposed procedure first derives a heuristic solution and then the optimal solution. The computational complexity for finding the optimal solution is very reasonable even for large systems, except in some extreme cases. Moreover, the heuristic solution can always be determined and is very close (and often equal) to the optimal solution. A comparison with the previous method of Vinod and Solberg shows that the present method performs very well.