Abstract
A full-functional FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) containing machining centers with all tools necessary for processing all products to be manufactured in the FMS has high flexibility but is too expensive to realize. A separated-functional FMS is introduced to reduce equipment costs without loss of the system flexibility by separately allocating tools to machining centers. A design problem of the separated-functional FMS is formulated as that of a closed queueing network model. Efficient solution methods to design the separated-functional FMS with balanced loading are proposed by exploiting conjectures derived in this paper. A numerical example is shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
