Reconfiguration effort based optimization for design problem of Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

Abstract

The design problem of reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS), depends upon part design specifications of product and system capabilities. The RMS consists of reconfigurable machines, tools, fixtures, layouts, etc. These system components are recon-figurable which makes the production system responsive to the change. This regular reconfiguration of the system’s components also requires effort. This effort affects the overall performance of the system. With maximization of the system’s component re-configurability to be more responsive towards the change, the overall effort should also be reduced to get good performance.A new reconfiguration effort index is defined, which considers all the efforts of reconfiguration at the process level, instead of just effort of machine configuration. The newly developed reconfiguration index is used as an objective function for solving the design problem of RMS, for selection of reconfigurable machine tool RMTs to get the best process plan with minimum effort of reconfiguration. A genetic algorithm-based approach is used to solve the problem. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The work is concluded with some future work directions.