الفهرس 
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Abstract
Due to the emergence of the highly dynamic environment concerned with reshaping the production systems where time has become the central competitive weapon, the concept of manufacturing flexibility has gained a considerable importance at both the theoretical and managerial levels. In the present work, the benefits of applying the quick response strategy are highlighted, the main sources 01” uncertainty and variability are portrayed and seven flexibility types, namely labour, material handling, product, routing, volume, shape and market flexibility are used to set a shield against these threats.
The prime objective of this study is to set up an index that would help enterprises adjust an appropriate level of flexibility to achieve a competitive advantage under quick response strategy. Manufacturing fallibility could level the uncertainties facing the enterprises and ensure a quick adaptation against internal changes and a quick response time to overwhelm external variabilities.
Different flexibility types are viewed and discussed along with their definitions; and mutual linkage; as well as the different flexibility measures and their approaches.
To set up the manufacturing flexibility index, each one of the seven flexibility types is decomposed into two functional elements: one covering the range aspect and the other covering the response aspect. To attain the desired flexibility level the ”range” elements have to be maximized while the ”response” elements have to be maximized within a predefined upper and lower bound.
The lack of knowledge about the relationships between flexibility types inhibits the process of knowledge elicitation by traditional methods. Hence, a fuzzy expert system is used to represent knowledge related to the measurement of manufacturing flexibility. Fuzzy-ID3 splitting algorithm is used to induce the rules based on a set of 54 examples. The use of Fuzzy-ID3 has resulted in a great decrease in the number of rules. A ”rule by rule” check was carried out to verify the coherence the continuity and the completeness of the rules. In addition, a rule-combined verification check was carried out to verify that the rules are mutually exclusive.