Flexible Manufacturing Systems Decision Support for Design and Operation

With shortening product lifetimes requiring trigger-fast manufacturing response to market changes, the Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) concept of short lead times, low inventory, and high adaptability should be having a field day. But the large amount of planning knowledge and the dispersed, interdisciplinary nature of the sources of that valuable information have held FMS back. Now, this comprehensive and systematic overview of both the design models and quantitative solution methods for FMS support, configuration, and operation rectifies that problem. Students, production managers/planners, and FMS installation planners can now find everything they need in one authoritative and up-to-date source, including... Full definitions of FMS, its subsystems, and the term "flexibility" Coverage of the complete FMS planning process from design to operation, with discussion of the full spectrum of long-range and short-range planning problems Quantitative models for evaluating the performance of each FMS design alternative Illustrations for each algorithm used, all taken from actual industrial FMSs Decision models for optimizing FMS routing, capacity, and equipment with numerical examples Discussion of classical approaches to performance evaluation as well as blocking and starving (with approximation procedures) Descriptions of a Windows-based program, FMS-Eval, as well as available FMS simulation models Whether it's used as supporting material in graduate level operations management, industrial and systems engineering, and operations research courses...as a cost- and time-saving guide to the problems and complex interdependencies of FMS for industrial decision makers...or as a desktop tool for planners who need access to the range of FMS design alternatives-this single volume is the FMS solution.Tempelmeier, Horst is the author of 'Flexible Manufacturing Systems Decision Support for Design and Operation' with ISBN 9780471307211 and ISBN 0471307211.