Manufacturing System Flexibility: Product Flexibility Assessment

Current manufacturing industries are experiencing a paradigm shift towards more flexibility to respond quickly and efficiently to constant changing customers’ requirements, new technologies and increasing product variety. Product flexibility is the ability of the manufacturing system to cope with the growing product variety to ensure better system performance.The aim of this paper is to point out the importance of product - resources interfaces in product flexibility assessment. Based on industrial experience, three product flexibility inductors are identified, which are gripping, setting and tooling interfaces, in order to build indicators as close as possible to real industry conditions. This research work investigates new factors to quantify product flexibility and provide manufacturing system designers with efficient decision-making support tools. In order to show the relevance of our approach, experimental results from the automotive industry are presented.