Production capacity of flexible manufacturing systems with fixed production ratios

Determining the production capacity of flexible manufacturing systems is a very important issue in the design of such systems. We propose an approach for determining the production capacity (i.e., the maximum production rate) of a flexible manufacturing system with several part types, dedicated pallets, and fixed production ratios among the different part types. We show that the problem reduces to the determination of a single parameter for which we propose an iterative procedure. Simulation or approximate analytical techniques can be used as the building block performance evaluation technique in the iterative procedure.