During the last decade many flexible assembly systems (FASs) have been adopted as alternatives to traditional labor-driven systems, and the number is expected to grow faster than ever. Design aids for such capital-intensive systems, however, have not been investigated in depth. Even existing ones are not adequate for real application because of simplicity of the underlying assumptions, treatment of isolated design issues, time-consuming techniques, and no machine flexibility consideration. Emphasis will be on an integrated design-aid tool for FASs which overcomes these setbacks. This tool will take three basic data (products, machines, and material handling systems) as input and provide cost-effective flow system designs (layout and operating policies) which satisfy target production requirements. The tool will employ two phases of analyses: rough-cut analysis and detailed analysis. The tool will model FAS aspects such as failure-prone machines, parallel-server stations, limited machine flexibility, finite buffer spaces, material handling delays, precedences among tasks, and a real-time pallet dispatch policy.
