The development of intelligent decision support tools to aid the design offlexible manufacturing systems

The design of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is an essential but cos tly process. Although FMS design appears to be an excellent area for applyi ng artificial intelligence (AI) and computer simulation techniques, to date there have been limited investigations on integrating AI with the modular simulation software available for FMS design. In this paper an integrated a pproach for the automatic design of FMS is reported, which uses simulation and multi-criteria decision-making techniques. The design process consists of the construction and testing of alternative designs using simulation met hods. The selection of the most suitable design (based on the multi-criteri a decision-making technique, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)) is emplo yed to analyze the output from the FMS simulation models. Intelligent tools (such as expert systems, fuzzy systems and neural networks), are developed for supporting the FMS design process. Active X technique is used for the actual integration of the FMS automatic design process and the intelligent decision support process. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.