A Grammatical Approach to Routing Flexibility in Large Manufacturing Systems

This paper considers the nature of routing flexibility in manufacturing systems and proposes methods for its quantification. Firstly, a measure of flexibility appropriate to Markovian routing is presented. It is shown that various other measures of the flexibility of systems so modelled presented in the literature are unrepresentative of the degree of routing flexibility. The information-theoretic approach to the Markovian model is then extended to a more realistic grammatical model, along with an example. It is shown that an adequate measure of the flexibility of the manufacturing system is given by the entropy of the language produced by the productions of its grammar. Shortcomings of such a measure are discussed along with proposals for future work.