Flexible manufacturing system

Greater machine eciency,

Improved quality,
Increased system reliability,
Reduced parts inventories,
Adaptability to CAD/CAM operations.
Shorter lead times
Improved eciency

2 Disadvantages

A typical FMS.

Cost to implement,

A exible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of exibility
that allows the system to react in case of changes, whether
predicted or unpredicted. This exibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories.

Substantial pre-planning
Requirement of skilled labour
Complicated system

The rst category, machine exibility, covers the systems

ability to be changed to produce new product types, and
ability to change the order of operations executed on a
part. The second category is called routing exibility,
which consists of the ability to use multiple machines to
perform the same operation on a part, as well as the systems ability to absorb large-scale changes, such as in volume, capacity, or capability.

3 Flexibility
Flexibility in manufacturing means the ability to deal with
slightly or greatly mixed parts, to allow variation in parts
assembly and variations in process sequence, change the
production volume and change the design of certain product being manufactured.

Most FMS consist of three main systems. The work

machines which are often automated CNC machines are
connected by a material handling system to optimize parts
ow and the central control computer which controls material movements and machine ow.

4 Industrial FMS Communication

An Industrial Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS)
consists of robots, Computer-controlled Machines, Numerical controlled machines (CNC), instrumentation devices, computers, sensors, and other stand alone systems
such as inspection machines. The use of robots in the production segment of manufacturing industries promises a
variety of benets ranging from high utilization to high
volume of productivity. Each Robotic cell or node will
be located along a material handling system such as a
conveyor or automatic guided vehicle. The production of
each part or work-piece will require a dierent combination of manufacturing nodes. The movement of parts
from one node to another is done through the material
handling system. At the end of part processing, the nished parts will be routed to an automatic inspection node,

The main advantages of an FMS is its high exibility in

managing manufacturing resources like time and eort in
order to manufacture a new product. The best application
of an FMS is found in the production of small sets of
products like those from a mass production.

Advantages
Reduced manufacturing cost
Lower cost per unit produced,
Greater labour productivity,
1

EXTERNAL LINKS

Token Bus has a deterministic message delay, but it does

not support prioritized access scheme which is needed in
FMS communications. Token Ring provides prioritized
access and has a low message delay, however, its data
transmission is unreliable. A single node failure which
may occur quite often in FMS causes transmission errors
of passing message in that node. In addition, the topology of Token Ring results in high wiring installation and
cost.
A design of FMS communication that supports a real
time communication with bounded message delay and reacts promptly to any emergency signal is needed. Because of machine failure and malfunction due to heat,
dust, and electromagnetic interference is common, a priTraining FMS with learning robot SCORBOT-ER 4u, workbench oritized mechanism and immediate transmission of emerCNC Mill and CNC Lathe
gency messages are needed so that a suitable recovery
procedure can be applied. A modication of standard
and subsequently unloaded from the Flexible Manufac- Token Bus to implement a prioritized access scheme was
turing System.
proposed to allow transmission of short and periodic messages with a low delay compared to the one for long
messages.[1]

5 Further reading
Manufacturing Flexibility: a literature review. By A.
de Toni and S. Tonchia. International Journal of
Production Research, 1998, vol. 36, no. 6, 1587617.
Computer Control of Manufacturing Systems. By Y.
Korem. McGraw Hill, Inc. 1983, 287 pp, ISBN
0-07-035341-7
CNC machine

The FMS data trac consists of large les and short

messages, and mostly come from nodes, devices and instruments. The message size ranges between a few bytes
to several hundreds of bytes. Executive software and
other data, for example, are les with a large size, while
messages for machining data, instrument to instrument
communications, status monitoring, and data reporting
are transmitted in small size.
There is also some variation on response time. Large program les from a main computer usually take about 60
seconds to be down loaded into each instrument or node
at the beginning of FMS operation. Messages for instrument data need to be sent in a periodic time with deterministic time delay. Other types of messages used for
emergency reporting are quite short in size and must be
transmitted and received with an almost instantaneous response. The demands for reliable FMS protocol that
support all the FMS data characteristics are now urgent.
The existing IEEE standard protocols do not fully satisfy
the real time communication requirements in this environment. The delay of CSMA/CD is unbounded as the
number of nodes increases due to the message collisions.

Manufacturing Systems Theory and Practice. By

G. Chryssolouris. New York, NY: Springer Verlag,
2005. 2nd edition.
Design of Flexible Production Systems Methodologies and Tools. By T. Tolio. Berlin: Springer, 2009.
ISBN 978-3-540-85413-5

6 References
[1] Hary Gunarto, An Industrial FMS Communication Protocol, UMI (Univ. Microlms International), Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 160 pp, 1988

7 External links
FMS video 1
FMS video 2
FMS video 3

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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Flexible manufacturing system Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_manufacturing_system?oldid=694859386 Contributors:

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