Abstract—Different designs of manufacturing systems are adopted in industry today. A good manufacturing design should be flexible to compensate for uncertainties such as demand fluctuations and machine breakdowns. A new conceptual manufacturing system called Multi-Channel Manufacturing (MCM) is expected to provide flexibility and efficiency under uncertainties. This paper proposes an integration model that considers capacity decisions and manufacturing system design. There are two objectives in this research. The first objective is to create a robust manufacturing system design over the planning horizon. The robust design considers the changes in the capacity decisions and in the operation strategies. The second objective is to show that robust MCM design is superior to other robust manufacturing system design based on the cost evaluation in this research. The results indicate that MCM design is often chosen to minimize cost. The results also demonstrate that different operation strategies are used to minimize cost for compensating the demand uncertainty.
Index Terms—Multi-channel manufacturing, MCM, manufacturing systems, robust design, capacity planning.
Ping-Yu Chang is with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City, 24311, Taiwan (e-mail: pchang@mail.mcut.edu.tw).
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Cite: Ping-Yu Chang, "Robust Hybrid Manufacturing System Design," International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 71-77, 2017.
