Calculation of transport system in flexible manufacturing

Abstract

Modern enterprises deal with a number of different material fluxes with respect to the transportation and storage systems, which can be considered as two parts of a whole warehouse system in a flexible manufacturing. At that, the warehouse system is considered as a regulator of the flows to compensate the uneven production in the enterprise or uneven delivery from outer suppliers. Up to date, the methods of the warehouse design rely mostly on the average indicators; however, they require the statistical data that are not always available, especially at the preliminary design stage. As a result, insufficient storage or transport capacity can form a ‘bottle neck’ that decreases the effective output of the enterprise. Thus, the implementation of the methods that considered the probabilistic character of the storage and delivery processes is necessary to avoid the miscalculation. Using the methodology of theory of mass service like the queuing theory, the capacity of the transport system can be determined without preliminarily collecting statistical data on the materials flows of arrival and departure, as well as processing these materials by methods of mathematical statistics and probability theory.