Improving process flexibility through products assignment with bill of material constraints

This paper investigates the effect of operational decisions on improving process flexibility of a flexible manufacturing system, which consists of multiple machine lines. The manufacturing system produces different types of products, whose structures are described by their bills of material (BOMs). When BOM constraints of products are considered, we observe that process flexibility of the flexible manufacturing system depends not only on the structure of each machine line, but also on the assignment decisions of products to machine lines. On the basis of the analysis of a measure for process flexibility with BOM constraints, we develop products assignment models to improve process flexibility of a flexible manufacturing system, which minimize the total demand shortfall of products in the system through assigning products to machine lines. Computational experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed models on improving process flexibility of a manufacturing system, and sensitivity analyses show performance robustness of our methods.