Delayed reconfigurable manufacturing system

Abstract

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) is a new manufacturing paradigm aiming at providing exactly functionality and capacity needed and exactly when needed. Reconfiguration is the main method to achieve this goal. But, the reconfiguration is an interruption to production activities causing production loss and system ramp-up problem and the ‘exact functionality’ may increase the reconfiguration efforts and aggravate the production loss and the ramp-up time. Therefore, a special RMS – delayed reconfigurable manufacturing system (D-RMS) is proposed to promote the practicality of RMS. Starting from the RMS built around part family with the characteristic of delayed differentiation, whose reconfiguration activities mainly occur in the latter stages of manufacturing system and the former stages have the potential to maintain partial production activities to reduce production loss during reconfiguration. Inspired from this, the basic structure of RMS is divided into two subsystems, subsystem 1 is capable of maintain partial production with a certain more functionality than needed, subsystem 2 reconfigure to provide exactly functionality and capacity of a specific part exactly when needed. And then, the benefits of D-RMS are analysed from inventory and ramp-up time aspects. Finally, a case study is presented to show the implementation process of D-RMS and validates the practicability of D-RMS.

Keywords:

• reconfigurable manufacturing systems
• delayed reconfigurable manufacturing system (D-RMS)
• ramp-up
• latter-stage reconfiguration
• production loss
• benefits analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped to improve this paper. All authors have approved to submit to your journal, and there is not any conflict of interest regarding the publication of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the supporting funds, National Natural Science Foundation of China [No.51105039, No. 51375049] and Graduate technological innovation project of Beijing institute of technology [Project No. 2017CX10040].