IIASA and VNIISI, Moscow, have made a one-year cooperative effort to prepare a statistical data bank in order to analyze flexible manufacturing systems in the world. For the time being the IIASA CIM data bank consists of 400 systems in the world and their detailed technical and economic description. This is about 60-70% of the world stock of FWS -- estimated to be 500-600 last year.
This is the first of three papers describing the analysis made from the data bank. It presents diffusion trends and basic economic advantages gained by the implementation of systems. It includes new structural data and gives a detailed insight into many impacts; it also proves some hypotheses as well as reveals a completely new type of hypothesis
