Maintaining Sustainability in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems Featuring Green-BOM

Dynamic and unpredictable market changes have brought more challenges to manufacturers. Manufacturers are required to design their production process with the ability not only to meet changing customer demands dynamically, but also to produce quality products at low cost and to stay sustainable by decreasing the emission and energy consumption. The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) appeared as a promising solution to cope with rapidly changing market demands. The RMS has the ability to satisfy the demand by quickly adapting (removing, adding, adjusting, changing) parts, which highly consider the set of machines, as known as reconfiguration in RMS. The RMS also has the capability to increase companies profit by optimizing its reconfiguration process where product family formation is crucial. However, in sustainability, three main parts need to be satisfied, which are social, economic, and environmental. The RMS is still lack in the environmental area. In order to increase the sustainability of RMS, Green Bill of Material (Green-BOM) is used as a supporting tool to maintain the eco-friendliness of each part/product. In this paper, product family formation is introduced to represent the main problem of reconfiguration process, and Green-BOM is introduced to maintain the sustainability within RMS. However, there is still lack of discussion or researches regarding sustainability within RMS. Therefore, a systematic approach is discussed by featuring Green Bill of Material (Green-BOM) to maintain sustainability within products and during product family formation