Process flexibility with bill of material constraints

During the realization of process flexibility, many potential benefits will be brought if bill of material (BOM) is considered. When we consider the BOM constraints, most current research results about process flexibility need to be re-appraised. This paper provides measures of process flexibility in different cases where the BOM constraints should be satisfied. Structural properties of achieving high process flexibility in different cases are also investigated, by which rules for the capacity expansion problems are developed. Computation experiments illustrate the rationality of the measures of process flexibility and effectiveness of the developed rules for the capacity expansion problems.