Design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems with strongly coupled nature

Abstract

Today’s manufacturing environment forces manufacturing companies to make as many product variations as possible at affordable costs within a short time. Mass customisation is one of most important technologies for companies to achieve their objectives. Efforts to mass customisation should be made on two aspects: ① To modularize products and make them as less differences as possible; ② To design manufacturing resources and make them provide as many processes variations as possible. This paper reports our recent work on aspect ②, i.e. how to design a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) so that it can be competent to accomplish various processes optimally; Reconfigurable robot system (RRS) is taken as an example. RMS design involves architecture design and configuration design, and configuration design is further divided in design analysis and design synthesis. Axiomatic design theory (ADT) is applied to architecture design, the features and issues of RRS configuration design are discussed, automatic modelling method is developed for design analysis, and concurrent design methodology is presented for design synthesis.