PERFORMANCE METRICS FOR PRODUCT FLOW CONFIGURATION IN A RECONFIGURABLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM (RMS)

We propose a systematic approach for product flow configuration selection for reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) that considers ten industrially relevant most important factors. The paper first defines performance metrics for the identified factors. A composite performance metric (CPM) has been proposed, which accounts for all ten-performance metrics to assess the performance of RMS with the help of a combined score. The methodology of developing CPM applies analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach where weightage to each of the performance metric is also considered. To showcase the usefulness and feasibility of the CPM, it has been applied in an industrial environment with the help of an industrial case study. Both the CPM and other metric scores were found to be quite useful to identify a suitable configuration out of the available alternatives.