Impact of dispatching and routing flexibility on the performance of an FMS - a simulation study

This paper is concerned with the effects of dispatching and routing decisions on the performance of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). Three routing policies, No Alternative Routings (NAR), Alternative Routings Dynamic (ARD), and Alternative Routings Planned (ARP) are first considered under four dispatching rules, namely, Shortest Total Processing time (STP), Shortest Imminent Processing Time (SIPT), Longest Total Processing time (LTP), and Longest Imminent Processing Time (LIPT), with infinite buffer capacity. However, in real-life, the size of the local buffers in FMSs may be limited by the size of the part types. Therefore, further experiments to investigate the above three routing policies under the four dispatching rules with finite buffer capacity are also conducted. The performance measures considered simultaneously are makespan, average machine utilization, and average lead time.