Improving process flexibility through products assignment with bill of material constraints

Authors:
Ping He;Xiaoyan Xu
Affiliations:
School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, PR China;School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, PR China
Venue:
Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
Year:
2009

Citing 5
Cited 0

Principles on the benefits of manufacturing process flexibility

Management Science
Investment Strategies for Flexible Resources

Management Science
Structural Flexibility: A New Perspective on the Design of Manufacturing and Service Operations

Management Science
Impact of Partial Manufacturing Flexibility on Production Variability

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Applying case-based reasoning for product configuration in mass customization environments

Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of operational decisions on improving process flexibility of a flexible manufacturing system, which consists of multiple machine lines. The manufacturing system produces different types of products, whose structures are described by their bills of material (BOMs). When BOM constraints of products are considered, we observe that process flexibility of the flexible manufacturing system depends not only on the structure of each machine line, but also on the assignment decisions of products to machine lines. On the basis of the analysis of a measure for process flexibility with BOM constraints, we develop products assignment models to improve process flexibility of a flexible manufacturing system, which minimize the total demand shortfall of products in the system through assigning products to machine lines. Computational experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed models on improving process flexibility of a manufacturing system, and sensitivity analyses show performance robustness of our methods.