Configuration Optimization Method of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

In the study, the dynamic variability of reconfigurable manufacturing systems has been addressed and the optimization scheme of component reconfiguration has been also presented. According to the product line process changes, the production line configuration for different products has been identified; stage as a unit, the system reconfiguration path model based graph theory is built up; the weight of each edge is defined according to economic, time and process constraints and the genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize and obtain the optimal/suboptimal reconfiguration path from one configuration to another configuration of multi-stage production line. At last, an actual example, a manufacturing line composed of three RMTs, is also presented. The results show that the methodology can concurrently optimize the process plans and configurations with high computation efficiency.

Optimization of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems Configuration: A Literature Review

“…Table 1 presents the configuration levels addressed by papers optimizing the RMS configuration, which are divided in three main types: (1) system and machine levels jointly (68.5%), ( 2) system-level (26%) and (3) machine-level (5.5%). There is no reference to layout design issues [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Machine configuration Configuration of a machine singly to produce a specific product or product family [53][54][55] However, machine configuration as well as its layout placement could highly affect manufacturing costs. Therefore, layout design and machine configuration must be considered together in the RMS configuration for process planning (PP) or production planning (ProP).…”