Real-Time Routing Selection in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Routing flexibility is one of the main peculiarities of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. This paper proposes three methods for real-time routing selection. The first one makes decisions comparing the current workload of machines in each alternative path. The second method considers the current workloads at the bottleneck machines in each allowed route. The third approach makes real-time decisions minimizing a merit index that represents a measure of the still required resource amount. The index is computed by short discrete-event simulation runs. Some case studies evaluate and compare the proposed approaches.