An agile production network enabled by reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Enabling adaptability and resilience of a global production network: A model to evaluate capital and operational expenses of reconfigurable production systems

“…The model uses hierarchical planning and is decomposed to a (i) strategic component for long-term investment and allocation decisions, and a (ii) tactical component for mid-term capacity and production decisions. The latter is inter-dependent on the former, where Epureanu et al [11] 2021 Network feedback mechanisms are used to enable interaction and agreement. LP is applied to minimize the (i) capital expenses: investments of modules, and (ii) operational expenses: setup and reconfiguration cost of machines, labor cost of operators, holding cost of products, and an opportunity cost of late deliveries.…”

“…In response to the outlined drivers, reconfigurability of production systems is increasingly relevant [1,10], as they can facilitate adaptability and resilience of GPNs [4,11,12] to unexpected scenarios [1]. Reconfigurability is a tactical and dynamic capability of production systems to convert functionality and scale capacity with reasonable effort across a family of similar products or parts [1,13].…”

“…A key issue for the evaluation, is a lack of research on the impact of reconfigurable systems on the performance of GPNs [4,10]. It has increased the gap to industrial contexts [24], which is critical due to the importance of GPNs in the economy [2] and as reconfigurable systems can facilitate adaptability and resilience [11,12]. This issue is also generally present in the research area of reconfigurability where the network level has been largely neglected [12,25,26], although potentials have been identified [27][28][29].…”

Fostering the Reuse of Manufacturing Resources for Resilient and Sustainable Supply Chains

“…In particular, the modular decomposition of reconfigurable machines makes them adaptable to evolving requirements [10,11] and reusable along the system's life cycle [12]. While research on RMSs at the system/shop floor level is grounded on extensive research since the mid-1990s, the research interest in RMSs as enablers of reconfigurable supply chains appears to be more recent [13][14][15][16]. Khan [13] referred to the modularity and scalability of RMSs to assess the impact of these systems on supply chain's delivery performances.…”

“…Khan [13] referred to the modularity and scalability of RMSs to assess the impact of these systems on supply chain's delivery performances. Epureanu et al [14] proposed an algorithm for the interaction between networks for determining the ramp-up time and reconfigurability capacity, thus promoting responsiveness of the RMSs to urgent and unexpected requirements. Belaiche et al [15] provided an optimization model based on minimum cost and time to create a responsive and effective supply chain process plan in connection with RMSs.…”