A design issue for a flexible manufacturing system is to find the number of each resource type which assures a given production ratio with a minimal cost. The FMS is modeled as a closed queueing network with a local buffer of limited capacity. An efficient method to determine this optical configuration is presented. The proposed method consists of three steps : 1) determine a lower configuration, 2) derive a heuristic solution, 3) find the optimal solution. The derived heuristic solutions are close to the optical solution.