Olejar Books

Manufacturing Flexibility is usually seen as the answer to demands in present markets. It can be characterized by short lead times, tight product tolerances, pressure on costs, frequent changes demand and continuous evolution of the technological requirements of the products. However, the competitiveness of a firm can be strongly affected by the burden of capital intensive investments into system flexibility. Designing optimized manufacturing systems represents a very complex problem. Manufacturing strategy, risk appraisal and management techniques, scenario analysis and system performance evaluation must be jointly taken into account over the system's lifecycle. Moreover, traditional system architectures usually do not represent the most efficient solutions to properly face new production contexts. Dedicated systems are not able to adapt to changes of the product characteristics while flexible systems often offer more flexibility than what is really needed, thus increasing investment and operating costs. It is shown that the design of flexibility will lead to hybrid systems, automated integrated systems where the products can be processed both by general purpose machines and by dedicated machines. This key issue of the book results from matching flexibility and productivity, respectively characterizing Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) and Dedicated Manufacturing Systems (DMSs). The authors give a profound view on optimized system flexibility, considering both advantages and disadvantages related to the acquisition of flexibility. In particular they show that the highest level of flexibility is not required in many production contexts. Manufacturing system flexibility can be rationalized by finding the best trade-off between productivity and flexibility. Those optimized manufacturing systems are named Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems - FFMSs.