Flexible Manufacturing System

Impact of Manufacturing Flexibility on Firm’s Productivity

A flexible manufacturing system is an automatic system that allows for changes either in volume of production or the parts being manufactured. This provides a buffer for last minute changes as well as flexibility for planned changes to quantity, parts type, or order of process.

In recent market scenario, the customer’s demands and specifications of any product changes very rapidly so, it is very important for a manufacturing system to these changes as quickly as possible to be able to compete in the market. This evolution produces a conflict for a manufacturing system because as the variety is increased the productivity decreases. So the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a good

Which has highly complex relation between its components. The mathematical programming approaches are very difficult to solve for very complex system so the simulation of FMS is widely used to analyse its performance measures. It has very sophisticated and costly components. In implementing FMS, it is better to analyse its results using simulation which involves no loss of money, resource and labour time. As a typical discrete event system FMS have been studied in such aspects as modelling and performance analysis. In this paper, a concept and implementation of the Petri nets for measuring and analysis of performance measures of FMS is applied.

 Advantages:

FMS systems have several advantages over traditional layouts, in the manufacture of parts. As explained earlier, FMS is more appropriate when there is moderate variability and demand. The advantages are listed below:

• WorkInProgress Inventory reduction

Since the transfer line limits the number of parts at any given time on the material handling system working process (WIP) can never exceed a predetermined level. FMS is similar to JIT (Just in Time). Therefore inventory reduction is an

Large program files from a main computer usually take about 60 seconds to be down loaded into each instrument or node at the beginning of FMS operation. Messages for instrument data need to be sent in a periodic time with deterministic time delay. Other types of messages used for emergency reporting are quite short in size and must be transmitted and received with an almost instantaneous response. The demands for reliable FMS protocol that support all the FMS data characteristics are now urgent. The existing IEEE standard protocols do not fully satisfy the real time communication requirements in this environment. The delay of CSMA/CD is unbounded as the number of nodes increases due to the message collisions. Token Bus has a deterministic message delay, but it does not support prioritized access scheme which is needed in FMS communications. Token Ring provides prioritized access and has a low message delay, however, its data transmission is unreliable. A single node failure which may occur quite often in FMS causes transmission errors of passing message in that node. In addition, the topology of Token Ring results in high wiring installation and