Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
4th International Conference on Responsive Manufacturing, ICRM 2007, Nottingham, İngiltere, 17 - 19 Eylül 2007
Flexibility is one of the key enablers of agile/responsive manufacturing. Although it is a well known fact that flexibility is critical in achieving agility and responsiveness its measurement and quantification is not very well understood and achieved. There are several studies in the literature aiming to quantify several aspects of flexibility especially in manufacturing systems like routing flexibility, product mix flexibility, volume flexibility etc. However, there is still a need to develop more generic measures that can be used to quantify flexibility of systems including manufacturing systems in order to enable decision makers to reach better decision in selecting between different system configurations. In this study a new approach based on digraph theory and matrix algebra is proposed to quantify flexibility of systems. Several examples are also provided to illustrate the proposed approach and its practicality and usefulness.