Production Loss Analysis in Mobile Multi-skilled Robot Operated Flexible Serial Production Systems

In a world where demand and supply can change instantaneously as demonstrated by the recent coronavirus pandemic, it is very important for our production lines to be able to handle abrupt changes very effectively. Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are designed to be able to ramp production up and down quickly to make this possible. In this paper, we propose a novel data-enabled method of modelling an FMS using mobile multi-skilled robots and evaluate its dynamic performance. We use permanent production loss as the performance metric and derive expressions for its evaluation and attribution and validate them using two case studies.