Approach to measure the mix response flexibility of manufacturing systems

Abstract

The mix response flexibility of a manufacturing system is the ability to change between product types quickly and economically. This paper proposes a new approach to measure this flexibility in terms of both capability and capacity. While the processing capability is represented as the number of operations that the machines can perform, the manufacturing capacity is modelled as the efficiency of different machines. The proposed model is applied to measure the mix response flexibility for both single and multiple machine systems.