Track: Simulation Competition

Abstract

The advancement of modern technology, specifically speaking Industry 3.0 and 4.0 has brought enormous amount of changes to the manufacturing sector. It has resulted in a very high automation of existing manufacturing sectors. Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) have become the backbone of the modern industries due to this technological advancement. However, the complexity of the FMS requires a system to be developed to analyze and design complex manufacturing systems. This paper attempts to find a solution to this problem. Simulation is a powerful tool that is used to study and analyze the system performance. Numerous works has been done by various researchers considering various types of flexibilities. The main aim of this study is to develop a demonstrative model of Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) using ARENA simulation software and to study the effect of operations flexibility on the performance of FMS. One of the reasons to select the operations flexibility for the study is due to very limited work done for this flexibility type. Based on the selected configurations, the conceptual and simulation models and their respective animations have been developed by ARENA Software. To verify the simulation results, multi-criteria decision making techniques viz. Grey Relational analysis (GRA) is used.
 

Keywords
Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Simulation, Operations Flexibility, Grey Relational analysis