Interactive decision support for flexible manufacturing systems using simulation techniques

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) have remained in the field of interest of engineers and researchers of various disciplines for over a decade. In many cases, however, FMSs are not as flexible and efficient as they were expected to be by the investors and designers. One of the reasons is that it is extremely difficult to predict actual demand and product mix at the stage of the system design. One of the possibilities to improve the quality of the system design is to use simulation tools to test a system under various operating conditions. In this paper we use the simulation program RUNSIM, which can be applied at all stages of the design and control of an FMS. However, the designing and control of an FMS is in general a multicriteria decision making problem, for which suitable methods should be applied. The idea of our approach is to use the simulation program as a solving module for an interactive decision support system.