Abstract
Reconfigurable manufacturing systems offer possibilities for customized flexibility on demand that aims for achieving cost-effective and rapid system changes. However, constantly changing customer requirements, increasing number of product variants, smaller batch sizes, and new emerging technologies pose challenges for the design of such systems. Especially smaller companies have major difficulties to develop even simple, cost-effective, and flexible manufacturing systems. There is an obvious need for low-threshold reconfigurable test-before-invest pilot systems which configuration can be changed according to current need. In such pilot systems companies can test new manufacturing technologies and concepts before investment decisions. While there are many articles for developing reconfigurable manufacturing systems, there are limited amount of research done for piloting environment perspective. Objective of this study is to present concept for the reconfigurable pilot line which fulfills frequently changing requirements of industry, research, and education by changing configuration of the system. Dimensions for reconfiguration decision-making are outlined for these systems. Based on these dimensions, evaluation criteria for feasibility analysis are defined to assess whether the reconfiguration concept is feasible from technical, resource, and economical point of views.
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