Effect of tool sharing on the reliability of flexible manufacturing systems

A manufacturer invests on FMS to enhance the availability of resources in order to maintain uninterrupted production. Tool failures pose a major obstacle to this objective. In this paper, a mathematical model has been developed to determine the spares requirement of the tooling system in FMS, so that a desired tooling system reliability is achieved while overall tooling cost is minimized. The influence of tool sharing on cost, reliability, spares requirement and tool magazine capacity of the FMS are analysed. The tools and tool transporter are subject to general failure distributions.