The evaluation of manufacturing systems using concordance and disconcordance properties

The organisations that are in pursuit of reconfigurations are often presented with a number of options and, hence, face the problem of evaluating the feasible alternative configurations before choosing the best one. The problem becomes more dominant if the conditions wanting reconfigurations change from time to time. There are a variety of factors which may either support or oppose a particular alternative. Therefore, there is a need for an appropriate methodology to evaluate the different configurations. This paper presents an approach for the assessment of alternative configurations using multiple criteria. This paper considers a manufacturing system which produces 30 products using different conventional machines and process plans for each product. This system is simulated using ProModel 6.2. Subsequently, eight different alternative configurations were developed and simulated, each under 24 experiments. The simulated results that pertain to 216 experiments were subjected to analyses to establish the competitiveness of the alternative configurations. For this, the Elimination and Choice-Translating Algorithm (ELECTRE) was used. The details of the simulation models, the analysis of the results, the ELECTRE approach and the drawn inference are presented in the paper.