Production planning decisions in flexible manufacturing systems with random material flows

This paper addresses the FMS planning problem of determining optimal machine workload assignments in order to minimize mean part flow time. This problem is decomposed into the following subproblems: (1) forming machine groups and (2) assigning operations to these groups. Three types of grouping configurations are considered: no grouping, partial grouping and total grouping. A simulation experiment is conducted to evaluate the alternative machine configurations to understand how their relative performance depends upon the underlying system characteristics, such as system utilization level and variation among operation processing times. Results show that, while different configurations minimize mean flow time under different parameter values, partial grouping with state-dependent part routing performs well across a wide range of these values.