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 a nd flexibility of the market of metal components for the automotive industr y. The new system architecture allows firms to produce, in a profitable way , a mix of different families of parts required in medium-large volumes. Th is paper proposes a description of the system architecture pointing out its advantages and drawbacks in terms of productivity and flexibility. In addi tion the proposed system architecture is compared with rigid transfer lines and parallel machines flexible manufacturing systems on the basis of disco unted cash flow indicators. Rigid and flexible systems are compared taking as a reference a real case. The influence of the variability of products an d volumes on the profitability of the different system architectures is als o investigated in this paper.