Flexible manufacturing systems

New transport and production resources support high flexibility, resulting in a wide range of options in the planning stage. By increasing flexibility, not only are the number of the decision variables and their domain increased, but the system cause-effect time relationships are as well, which complicates the decision-making activities. In fact, flexibility can lead to benefits but can also lead to idle/oversaturated resources and earliness/tardiness in the final product. The difference between obtaining benefits or losses may depend on the decision-making activity. In this chapter, a discrete-event system modelling methodology to tackle flexibility in present production industries by means of simulation techniques is introduced. The main aspects of the proposed approach using Arena^© are applied to remove non-productive operations in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS).