Axiomatic measures of flexibility in advanced manufacturing systems

It is noted that, although the literature on flexible manufacturing systems has lately become abundant, it offers little in the way of a systematic and rigorous treatment of the notion of flexibility and its value to system performance. The authors attempt to address some of these limitations by providing a framework for generating sound measures of manufacturing flexibility. In particular, key features of system flexibility are identified and required properties that a measure of each of these features should satisfy are outlined. Examples of measures satisfying such properties are then proposed