Performance Analysis of Partial Flexible Manufacturing Systems

The importance of manufacturing flexibility has gained momentum in recent times due to product variety and faster response time required by the customers. The application of partial flexibility applied in shop floor control has shown that many benefits of total flexible systems can be obtained by less flexible systems. The levels of routing flexibility are utilized to distinguish between different types of flexible systems. In particular, routing flexibility allows system resources to process parts based on some control logic. Partial flexible system is an intermediate configuration between a total flexible system (where each part can be processed on all the available resources) and a non-flexible system (where each part has dedicated resources). A simulation study is carried out to measure the make-span performance of different systems. In this study, different variables considered are routing flexibility, sequencing rules, buffer size, system load, setup time, pallets, and part mix. Simulation results show that partial flexible system performs almost at par with total flexible system under different system variables. A sensitivity analysis is done to see the impact of different sequencing rule and system load on the system performance.