Effect of routing flexibility on the performance of manufacturing system

Abstract

This work presented in this paper is based on the simulation of the routing flexibility enabled manufacturing system. In this study four levels of each factor (i.e. routing flexibility, system load conditions, system capacity and four part sequencing rules) are considered for the investigation. The performance of the routing flexibility enabled manufacturing system (RFEMS) is evaluated using three performance measures like make-span time, resource utilization and work-in-process. The analysis of results shows that the performance of the manufacturing system may be improved by adding in routing flexibility at the initial level along with other factors. However, the benefit of this flexibility diminishes at higher levels of routing flexibilities.

Keywords

• flexibility
• flexible manufacturing system
• routing flexibility
• makespan, work-in-process, resource utilization.