Models for Understanding Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The basic features of flexible manufacturing systems are reviewed and models for determining the production capacity of such systems are developed. These models show the desirability of a balanced work load, the benefit of diversity in job routing if there is adequate control of the release of jobs (a job shop can be better than a flow shop), and the superiority of common storage for the system over local storage at machines. The models are extended to allow for material handling delays between machines and for unreliable machines. It is also shown that production capacity models can be used to develop good approximations to the mean number of jobs in the system for given job arrival rates and machine utilizations.