FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS MODELLING AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION USING AUTOMOD

In recent times flexible manufacturing systems emerged as a powerful technology to meet the continuous changing customer demands. Increase in the performance of flexible manufacturing systems is expected as a result of integration of the shop floor activities such as machine and vehicle scheduling. The authors made an attempt to integrate machine and vehicle scheduling with an objective to minimize the makespan using Automod. Automod is a discrete event simulation package used to model and simulate a wide variety of issues in automated manufacturing systems. The key issues related to the design and operation of automated guided vehicles such as flow path layout, number of vehicles and traffic control problems are considered in the study. The performance measures like throughput, machine and vehicle utilization are studied for different job dispatching and vehicle assignment rules in different flexible manufacturing system configurations. (Received in August 2010, accepted in April 2011. This paper was with the authors 1 month for 2 revisions.)