Designing Manufacturing Flexibility in Dynamic Production Contexts

Manufacturing Flexibility is seen as the main answer for surviving in markets characterized by frequent volume changes and evolutions of the technological requirements of products. However, the competitiveness of a firm can be strongly affected by capital intensive investments in system flexibility. This chapter presents an approach to design new manufacturing system architectures endowed with the right level of flexibility required by the specific production problem. These systems are named Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems (FFMSs). The key idea consists in tuning system flexibility on the production problem to cope with uncertainty related to the evolution of product demand. The significance of this topic and its potential impact on the industrial sector in the medium-long run is testified by the interest shown by companies making initial efforts in this field.