Abstract
Reconfigurable manufacturing, providing capacity and functionality on demand, is an ever more important factor of competitiveness in volatile, unpredictable, and rapidly changing markets. In this regard, scalability and convertibility are considered particularly relevant characteristics, as they directly reduce reconfiguration effort and enhance system responsiveness. However, in previous research, scalability and convertibility have predominately been addressed conceptually on a high level of abstraction with only limited consideration of how specific manufacturing elements can enhance and realize them. Therefore, the objective of this paper is first to identify and classify elements enabling scalability and convertibility in order to bring reconfigurability-related concepts closer to the world of practitioners. Moreover, as a result, the paper concretizes scalability and convertibility and provides a foundation for future empirical research on reconfigurability.
Highlights
Reconfigurability of manufacturing systems has been studied since the late 90’s as a key to competitiveness in scenarios characterized by unpredictability of markets [1]
Criteria have been defined for analyzing previous research and ensure coverage of reconfigurability as a multi-dimensional capability and in turn create a basis for future research based on case studies
Rules are Managerial elements (ME) even if the possibility to benefit of the IT support is related to the connectivity of production resources. Both rules and IT support are enablers of scalability and convertibility only if, during the CP, these are designed with a RP perspective: in this case, they would be oriented at speeding up the adaptation to change by improving production resources synchronization during reconfigu-rations, allowing more frequent reconfigurations [30], [31]
Summary
Reconfigurability of manufacturing systems has been studied since the late 90’s as a key to competitiveness in scenarios characterized by unpredictability of markets [1]. In previous research, these characteristics have predominately been addressed on rather abstract levels with only limited consideration of the manu-facturing elements that enhance these characteristics, their inherent relations, and how they can be realized in manufacturing [13]–[15] In this regard, recon-figurability is increasingly being promoted as a multi-dimensional and complex ca-pability that can be designed and implemented for different manufactur-ing contexts, by exploiting relationships between core characteristics and/or enablers [13], [14] at multiple manufacturing levels [16], [17]. Focus is limited to the factory and lower manufacturing levels, where previous research on manufacturing “elements”, “enablers” or “assessment criteria” (enabling specific characteristics of reconfigurability and/or enabling reconfigurability as a capability in itself [3], [18]–[20]) has been considered For this purpose, criteria have been defined for analyzing previous research and ensure coverage of reconfigurability as a multi-dimensional capability and in turn create a basis for future research based on case studies. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents criteria for identifying and classifying enabling elements, Section 3 provides the results and Section 4 presents conclusions and outlines future development of this research
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