Decision-making for flexible manufacturing systems’ technology choice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a method for decision-making support for technology´s choice in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). The object is a manufacturing cell of the automotive industry. The research method is the qualitative-quantitative modeling. In the qualitative part, specialists in automation engineering created three technological scenarios for the implementation of the FMS. In the quantitative part of the research, six members of the management team used a multicriteria decision support method to distribute importance among competitive priorities and to assess how much each technological scenario can influence each competitive priority. The research also proposes two calculation methods for the final merit of the scenarios. According to both methods, the best scenario was the third one, based on the use of robots. The study also concluded that the adoption of the third scenario is better than do nothing, i.e., continuing with the current manual installation.