A Part Release considering Tool Scheduling and Dynamic Tool Allocation in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

In order to adapt to rapid changes of manufacturing environment, a trend in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) is to compose identical versatile machines and to use dynamic tool allocation strategy, sharing tools between machines with fast tool delivery system. Unlike a conventional FMS where parts are fed to the machines with the required tools, tools are acquired from other machines using a tool delivery system and parts can be finished on the same machine in these FMS. Therefore it is more important problem to plan tool flow using tool delivery system in these FMS rather than part flow in conventional FMS. In this paper, in FMS under dynamic tool allocation strategy, a method of part release considering tool scheduling at the stage of part release is proposed. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed part release it is compared with other part release through simulation experiments. Performance measures in these experiments are the throughput and the number of tardy parts