Reconfiguration of Production Equipment of Matrix Manufacturing Systems

Since the introduction of the assembly line in production around 100 years ago, the principal of mass and series production has not changed much. However, in the last decades, more individualized products lead to higher product variants, which challenge rigidly linked assembly lines. To provide higher adaptability to changing product variants and volumes, in manufacturing as well as in assembly, the concept of a production system structured as a matrix is developed (abbreviated as MMS). Here, the equipment of the production system is composed of various process modules providing the needed functions. Depending on the needed functions, the work pieces literally search by and by their way through production. The process modules themselves consist of one or more stations providing process functionalities. Assuming that these stations can be distributed to the various process modules in short time, this production structure offers a high changeability during operation. It can be used to reconfigure the system continuously to changing production programs. Through the high degrees of freedom of a matrix production system, finding this optimal configuration of the equipment can be seen as a complex task. For the initial planning of the system, several approaches exist. However, so far, there is no method for reconfiguring the system to changed requirements, mainly to changes of the composition of the production programs, during the operation of the production system. This paper gives an overview of the task and sketches an approach of how to indicate that a reconfiguration is beneficial and subsequently to find and realize an optimized one. Therefore, the feedback control technique is introduced and it is shown, how it can be applied in continuous change processes of production entities. Then, the technique is adapted to apply it to the reconfiguration problem of MMS. Finally, the needed research to realize that approach is outlined.