Effects of loading and routeing decisions on performance of flexible manufacturing systems

Research has found that while flexibility is purported to be a prime advantage of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), it has not yet become a major competitive priority for American and European manufacturers. Moreover, many installed systems either are not very flexible or do not use the available flexibility to the best advantages. The authors suspect that inappropriate application of the conventional production management concepts to FMS is one of the major factors that hinders current FMSs for capturing their key advantage: flexibility. This paper takes a first step to examine why the conventional job shop loading and fixed routeing concepts fail to capture the flexibility of FMS. Once problems are identified the authors suggest ways to exploit the FMS flexibility. They further conduct an experiment to investigate FMS performance under different manufacturing policies and operating conditions. The results indicate that the performance of an FMS greatly diminishes when the conventional job shop loading and fixed routeing concepts are applied. This is because the inherent flexibility of the FMS is not fully utilized. Moreover, the operating conditions such as tooling duplication levels and operation processing time variation could also significantly affect the FMS performance.