FLEXIBILITY AND AVAILABILITY OF FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS - AN INFORMATION-THEORY APPROACH

Over the past few years manufacturing organizations have witnessed radical changes in their environment. In order to survive and grow, management has to react quickly to such changes. In some cases enhanced flexibility of production systems has improved the ability of managers to respond. Several types of manufacturing flexibility have been identified in the literature. Concomitantly, a number of measures of flexibility are proposed. However, the literature which deals with the relationship between manufacturing flexibility and other manufacturing objectives such as systems availability is sparse. In this paper, we have developed several models, based on information theory, to study such relationships. More specifically, the models determine (a) the availability distribution of flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) which maximizes the flexibility of flexible manufacturing systems; using this availability distribution they provide (b) the distribution of load on FMCs, and (c) the probability that a job will be processed by a given cell when it can be processed by two or more cells.