System Engineering-Based Methodology to Design Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Nowadays, the market is characterized by a high level of competitiveness and very frequent and sudden variations within the production context. The critical review of the existing manufacturing paradigms, which are the dedicated manufacturing lines (DMLs) and the flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), reveals that these systems are not capable of fulfilling the requirements imposed by the current market; these requirements are mainly resumed in cost, quality and reactivity. Therefore, the need for a new manufacturing paradigm that could fulfil these requirements has arisen. Reconfigurable manufacturing system or RMS is this new paradigm; it is supposed to be reactive enough to cope with the sudden changes in the market while keeping the products’ quality high at a low cost. The main challenge in RMS is their design. Most of the suggested methods in the literature do not address the RMS design issue as a whole; they treat just a part of the problem. Hence, as a contribution, we propose in this chapter, a generic RMS design methodology based on systems engineering (SE). This methodology will support the RMS design along the development process. It is based specifically on the standard ISO/IEC/IEEE15288, which is the most recent standard in SE discipline.