A Systematic Design Approach for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

The evolution of manufacturing systems is triggered by the dynamic customer environment of its time. The main characteristics of today’s customers’ environment are mass customization and responsiveness to market demand and thus the reconfigurable manufacturing system was suggested for such environment. This paper presents a systematic approach for the design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems and how to control that design process through developing an open mixed architecture for that purpose. The architecture prescribes the different design activities starting from capturing market demand to the system-level configuration and finally the component-level implementation, and also provides some performance measures that are used to control the design process. An example of a reconfigurable automatic PCB assembly line is used to illustrate an application of the developed architecture in real world manufacturing system design.