A Vehicle Routing Problem and Product Quality Embedded with a Scalable Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

Reconfigurable Manufacturing System can accommodate high functionality, throughput, and product variety. It offers several routes to produce the same product which makes it difficult to analyze the product quality in each route. In addition, in RMS, the use of different configurations incurs different production, changeover and modular times. This can cause variability in delivering the product to customer location, depending on the configurations selected for production. To address the quality issues and arrival concerns, this study designs a scalability characteristic based reconfigurable manufacturing system in the context of a supply chain i.e., a vehicle routing problem (RMS-VRP). In addition, the analysis considers quality variation of a reconfigurable manufacturing system due to defects. A multi-objective model is proposed that considers the objectives of the total cost and the scalability of a reconfigurable manufacturing system and a vehicle routing problem. The scalability is necessitated by defective manufacturing and delayed delivery to the depot. A hybrid and automatically calibrated version of genetic algorithm and variable neighborhood search is used for implementing the model. Finally, key findings, conclusion and future research streams are provided.