A generic approach to measuring the machine flexibility of manufacturing systems

Despite extensive studies on the flexibility of manufacturing systems over the last two decades, a unified measurement approach has not been developed. In this study, we propose a generic model to measure machine flexibility with consideration of the dynamic perspective of manufacturing systems. To this end we integrate two streams of machine flexibility from the literature: operational capability-based machine flexibility and time/cost-based machine flexibility. The resulting framework to measure machine flexibility is a two-stage process: the time/cost-based machine flexibility is measured using a super efficiency DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model and operational capability-based machine flexibility is incorporated as the number of operations a machine can execute with a positive degree of efficiency.