A dynamic approach to measure machine and routing flexibilities of manufacturing systems

The ability for a manufacturing system to easily adapt to various uncertainties in their production system is described as manufacturing flexibility. Over the past two decades manufacturing flexibility has become an important part of many production systems. Existing models, however, only include a few of the many technological attributes that can be found in manufacturing systems. This study considers a number of technological attributes that are common to manufacturing systems and incorporates them in the development of two manufacturing flexibility models that evaluate the performance of production systems. The first model defines a measure for machine flexibility and the second defines a measure for routing flexibility. Technological attributes such as the efficiency of processing an operation, the number of different operations a machine can perform, the fraction of an operation that can be transferred during disturbances, the probability of transferring an operation to alternative routes, are just a few of the attributes included in our flexibility models. We perform a set of tests that illustrate the strength of our models with respect to machine and routing flexibilities and highlight some of the weaknesses present in previous flexibility models.