A new system architecture compared with conventional production system architectures

A new concept of manufacturing system architecture is proposed in order to improve the reaction of the firms to the growing requests of productivity and flexibility of the market of metal components for the automotive industry. The new system architecture allows firms to produce, in a profitable way, a mix of different families of parts required in medium--large volumes. The paper proposes a description of the system architecture pointing out its advantages and drawbacks in terms of productivity and flexibility. In addition the proposed system architecture is compared with Rigid Transfer Lines and parallel machines Flexible Manufacturing Systems on the basis of discounted cash flow indicators. Rigid and flexible systems are compared taking as a reference a real case; the influence of the variability of products and volumes on the profitability of the different system architectures is also investigated in the paper.