System for product flow configuration selection for reconfigurable manufacturing system

This paper is about the development of a system for product flow configuration selection for a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) facing variations in product design and production volume. The system accounts for a multitude of factors, such as part and process parameters, manufacturing capabilities, operation clustering, in-line inspection, and number of operators for generating feasible machine configurations. Multi-objective optimization, which considers important factors influencing reconfiguration decisions has been used first to generate feasible product flow configurations (PFC) which are optimal. Thereafter, the best PFC is selected on the basis of their performance rating in terms of composite performance metric score. The developed system “Reconfiguration Optimizer” also provides a graphic user interface, which prompts the user to input the requisite information in a user-friendly manner and displays the selected configuration with its composite performance metric score. The paper addresses major problems faced by the decision-makers who have to consider a multitude of factors, perform a lot of computations, and comparative performance analysis to select a suitable PFC. The capabilities of the developed system have been demonstrated with the help of an industrial case study.