Design and analysis of a flexible manufacturing system with simulation-effects of flexibility on FMS performance

An extensive simulation model is developed to analyze Mazatrol flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The Mazatrol FMS is a module-type FMS consisting of several machining centers, load/unload stations, a stacker crane, a pallet stocker, etc. An analysis of the effects of various types of flexibility on FMS performance is presented. In particular, attention is given to the effects of such factors as the number of alternative machines that can perform a particular operation (called RFLEX) and the number of pallets for each type of operation. It is found that the flexibility of the overall system depends very much on RFLEX. When RFLEX=1 (i.e. one-to-one correspondence between an operation and a machine as in a standard job shop model), the system has limited flexibility; flexibility increases substantially when RFLEX is increased from 1 to 2, whereas further increase in RFLEX contributes only marginally to flexibility