The effect of routing flexibility on a flexible system of integrated manufacturing

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) have gained consideration due to their ability to produce customised and an increasing variety of products with shorter life cycles. A considerable amount of research has been done on manufacturing flexibility from different angles. There are many different types of manufacturing flexibility being reported in the literature, and routing flexibility is one of them. The paper focuses on the study of routing flexibility in a flexible system of integrated manufacturing (FSIM) from the view of real-time control strategies. However, flexibility incurs cost hence a judicious decision is required for implementing the right level of flexibility under a different operating environment. The paper studies the impact of routing flexibility and control strategies on the performance of FSIM. The application of discrete event simulation and Taguchi's method is applied to study the various factors contributing to FSIM performance and identifies the vital parameters for improving performance. Furthermore, the most significant factor is determined by using the analysis of variance (ANOVA). The result shows that increasing routing flexibility cannot be treated as a key role in system improvement. It is also found that there is the influence of control strategies on the performance of FSIM. Finally, it is observed that, the impact on the system performance due to the system load condition is the largest, and that of the number of pallets is the smallest.