“…An increasing tendency towards the use of the low-cost automation in manufacturing in recent years has caused a considerable number of research activities to focus on problems of configuration selection as well as the operation and control of small flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) (Banaszak, 1991;Jacot and Ladet, 1993;Morgenweck, 1992;Siemiatkowski and Feld, 1993). The prevailing experiences worldwide (Bharali et al, 1993;Boubekri et al, 1995;Kato et al, 1993), and a study of the literature (Ganesh and Srinivasan, 1994;Niemi and Davies, 1989;Rembold et al, 1993) point to the need to develop robot served FM-cells consisting of machine tool stations, positioned in twos, where the work flow is based on demand from the cell and despatcher-set priorities.…”