Flexible manufacturing system

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. The basic idea of the system is to:

  • Use all (similar) connected machines as parallel resources, meaning every machine can manufacture every operation of every part, thus increasing the utilization of the connected machines and
  • Separate the takt of the human operations (part clamping and unclamping) from the takt of the machines by doing the part clamping in separate setup stations instead of doing it on the machine table, thus consolidating the need of human work to longer stints, with the possibility to totally unmanned operations in between them.

This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories.

  • The first category is called routing flexibility, which covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and the ability to change the order of operations executed on a part.
  • The second category is called machine flexibility, which consists of the ability to use multiple machines to perform the same operation on a part, as well as the system's ability to absorb large-scale changes, such as in volume, capacity, or capability.

Most flexible manufacturing systems consist of three main systems:

  1. The work machines which are often automated CNC machines, most typically 4- or 5-axis machining centers are connected by
  2. A material handling and buffering system including the setup stations and
  3. The central control computer plans the production and controls material movements and machine flow.

The main advantage of a flexible manufacturing system is its high flexibility in managing manufacturing resources like time and effort to manufacture a new product.

The best application of a flexible manufacturing system is found in the randomly repeating production of small sets of products like those from mass production.

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