The deployment of strategic requirements in manufacturing systems design

The correct interpretation of the manufacturing strategy into measures of manufacturing performance, followed by their mapping onto appropriate manufacturing capabilities of the manufacturing system elements constitute the major tasks of manufacturing system design. Such tasks involve multiple-criteria-decision-making. This paper presents a discussion of manufacturing strategy and its close and significant relationship with manufacturing system design decisions. A methodology to focus on the more important design parameters affecting the operational performance of manufacturing systems, while providing tractability during the design stage is outlined. Starting at the strategic level, a hierarchy of requirements has been identified which form the framework for defining a manufacturing system. The requirements are deployed by using the planning matrices of quality function deployment. The deployment of these requirements down the hierarchy is governed by the degree of importance of the requirements at the higher level as well as the strength of the relationship between a requirement and the parameters that fulfil it. Some initial results using a few numerical examples are presented for the case of equipment selection problem in manufacturing system design. The potentials and limitations of such approach will be discussed