1Professor, Kamala Institute of Technology And Science, Huzarabad, Karimnagar (Dist), Telangana(State), India
2Assistant Professor, Kamala Institute of Technology And Science, Huzarabad, Karimnagar (Dist), Telangana(State), India
Online published on 24 October, 2017.
Today's customer orientated markets are demanding for mid variety, mid volume products. Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is the better option to meet this requirement. To get the benefits from FMS, its resources must be utilized effectively, for which scheduling is the better solution. To schedule the dynamic environment of an FMS, discrete event simulation is the right choice. FlexSim is a powerful tool which will be very much useful in analyzing the FMS environment. There are a variety of flexibilities available in FMS and alternative routing is one among them. This flexibility reduces the waiting time and increases the utilization of the machines. There are various objective measures through which the performance of an FMS can be evaluated. Make span is the important measure of performance and the other performance measures commonly considered are utilization of resources like machines and material handling system.
In this paper the authors have made an attempt to study the effect of alternative machines in scheduling an FMS. For this two layouts are considered and Flexsim software is used as a simulation tool for evaluating the performance of an FMS.
AGV, FlexSim, FMS
