Modeling and Analysis of Flexible Manufacturing System with FlexSim

Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a highly integrated manufacturing system. The relation between its components is very complex. The mathematical programming approaches are very difficult to solve for very complex system so the simulation of FMS is widely used to analyze its performance measures. Also the FMS components are very sophisticated and costly. If FMS has to be implemented then it is better to analyze its results using simulation which involves no loss of money, resource and labour time. As a typical discrete event system FMS have been studied in such aspects as modeling and performance analysis. In this paper, a concept and implementation of the Flexsim for measuring and analysis of performance measures of FMS is applied. The other well defined mathematical technique, i.e. bottleneck technique has also been applied for the purpose of comparison and verification of the simulation results. An example FMS has been taken into consideration and its flexsim model and mathematical model has been constructed. Several performance measures have been used to evaluate system performance. And it has been found that the simulation techniques are easy to analyze the complex fexible manufacturing system.