THE ANALYSIS OF THE VALUE OF FLEXIBILITY TO SWITCH IN FMS BASED ON THE THOUGHT OF REAL OPTIONS

摘要

Flexible Manufacturing System(FMS) has to take into account the tradeoff between benefit and its cost for flexibility. The flexibility supplied by FMS is valuable, and it is some quality of real options to obtain it by increasing investment. The approach of real options could offer an effective way to value the flexibility in FMS, and to tradeoff its benefit and cost. Based on the thought of real options, this paper discusses the value of flexibility to switch and its optimal strategy on the view of allowing for the presence of switch cost and without it. In the first section of this paper, it introduces a generic way of applying the approach of real options in analyzing the flexibility to switch products in FMS; then it analyses the value of switch flexibility on the hypothesis that the cost of switching technology is zero, and gives an optimal operation sequence in FMS; furthermore, it takes into account the presence of switch cost, even in the likelihood of the switch costs from different procedure are not e-qual, then analyses the switch flexibility and gives an optimal operation sequence analogously; in the last section, on the basic of above, it offers a generic model to extend to a more generic situation, through which we can calculate the switch flexibility and gives an optimal operation sequence in FMS.