Development of a framework for selecting the best collaboration path between machines for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) appeared as a solution to high variation in customer demands allowing manufacturers to satisfy demands in different period. RMS satisfies demands by rapidly reconfiguring its hardware and software components, to quickly adjust its production capacity and functionality within a part family in response to sudden market changes or intrinsic system change. This reconfiguration process brings a critical issue within the RMS that is called as reconfiguration planning problems (RPP) introduced in this paper. RPP includes selecting best collaboration path between machines which consists of line balancing, designing configuration, selecting best configuration and between-configurations to finally minimize reconfiguration cost. The reconfiguration process of transitioning the previous configuration to new configuration requires time, cost, and effort between possible newly added machines which is represented as between-configurations in this paper. In this paper, a mathematical model to minimize reconfiguration cost is developed based on the weighting of corresponding criteria by selecting the best configuration ranked by importance and weight by using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques, based on the step-by-step reconfiguration planning procedure. The result of this paper will be helpful in the future of developing an efficient and effective RMS for long-term planning horizon. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.