Focused Flexibility in Production Systems

Manufacturing flexibility is seen as the main mechanism for surviving in the present market environment. Companies acquire systems with a high degree of flexibility to cope with frequent production volume changes and evolutions of the technological requirements of products. However, literature and industrial experience show that flexibility is not always a well-defined concept. Therefore it is really complex to understand and use flexibility during system design process. Indeed, the development of structured approaches to support the system design by considering basic flexibility forms is still an open issue. This work presents an Ontology on Flexibility aiming at providing a standard method to analyze flexibility. Firstly, it contributes in systemizing the large number of existing flexibility definitions and classifications. Secondly, it can be used to analyze real systems and to better understand their characteristics in terms of flexibility. Finally this ontology represents a key point of a general approach to design production system with the right level of flexibility.