Evaluation of Reconfigurability in Brownfield Manufacturing Development

Abstract

To enable manufacturing firms adapting their manufacturing capabilities to meet the market demands in a cost-efficient way the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing was initiated. A majority of the research within this field targeting production development has been focused on greenfield development methods, enabling the developers to ignore context and constraints that brownfield development methods cannot. The greenfield focus in reconfigurability research has resulted in how to find optimal solutions to reconfiguration problems. Taking a brownfield focus on reconfigurable manufacturing development would enable to move step-by-step towards a reconfigurable manufacturing strategy instead of the all-or-nothing approach of greenfield development methods. This study investigates through a literature review what assessment tools and methods that exists in literature, and classifies them into four categories, i.e. Configuration evaluation, Element of evaluation, Pre-design evaluation, and Potential evaluation. It is found that there only exist two assessment tools for potential evaluation. Through a multiple case study, the potential evaluation process is evaluated, and three gaps is identified, i.e. lack of connection to strategy, lack of predefined goals for reconfigurability, and the difficulty in interpreting the result of the analysis. These gaps are then address in a new conceptual assessment process for assessing the potential of reconfigurability. The conceptual assessment process links the six reconfigurability characteristics throughout the whole assessment process to link manufacturing strategy to the improvement suggestions.

How the technologies underlying cyber-physical systems support the reconfigurability capability in manufacturing: a literature review

“…Figure 1 The four stages of the manufacturing system life cycle Moreover, reconfigurability can be broken down to six characteristics: modularity, integrability, diagnosability, scalability, convertibility, and customization (Boldt and Rösiö 2020;Bi et al 2008b;Andersen, Brunoe, and Nielsen 2015;. Customization refers to the ability to customize the system to be able to produce the required product family and can be seen as the change driver and trigger of the reconfigurability capability (Boldt and Rösiö 2020). Therefore, customization has a strategic role.…”

“…Referring to the manufacturing system life cycle, a "sequence of utilization" of the characteristics that allows achieving customization can be also introduced Napoleone, Pozzetti, and Macchi 2018;Boldt and Rösiö 2020;Singh et al 2017).…”

“…One of the main challenges in moving towards reconfigurable manufacturing is the development of a strategy aimed to increase the level of reconfigurability through the definition of long-term goals, type and extent of changes needed, and required enablers (Boldt and Rösiö 2020). For what concerns the enablers, the ongoing 4 th industrial revolution leads to new opportunities.…”

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems in Global Production Networks

“…Qualitative case studies were conducted by Heim et al [174] in 2014 based on works from 2006-2012 [175][176][177][178][179] and by Boldt et al [180] in 2021 based on a method from 2020 [181]. The studies evaluate the extent of reconfigurability enablers' embodiment in present manufacturing systems.…”