Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

New transport and production resources support high flexibility, resulting in a wide range of options in the planning stage. By increasing flexibility, not only are the number of the decision variables and their domain increased, but the system cause–effect time relationships are as well, which complicates the decision-making activities. In fact, flexibility can lead to benefits but can also lead to idle/oversaturated resources and earliness/tardiness in the final product. The difference between obtaining benefits or losses may depend on the decision-making activity. In this chapter, a discrete-event system modelling methodology to tackle flexibility in present production industries by means of simulation techniques is introduced. The main aspects of the proposed approach using Arena^© are applied to remove non-productive operations in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS).