SME-oriented flexible design approach for robotic manufacturing systems

Abstract Continuously growing pressures due to the shorter development lead-time and the uncertainty of increasingly complex market require a high flexibility from production companies and their manufacturing systems. Comparing with large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which lack concentrated market power and powerful original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have difficulty and risk to develop flexible and customised robotic manufacturing systems. Nowadays, although various design methods for robotic manufacturing systems have been made to fix this problem, however, there still exist two main challenges: flexibility in design and high degree of customisation. To deal with the existing challenges, this paper proposes an SME-oriented design approach based on a configuration design paradigm. This method can offer decision support to designers to form flexible architecture for robotic manufacturing systems and, at the same time, give more interactive configuration freedom to customers so as to achieve a high productivity and flexibility for customisation but with less risk and cost of product development. To validate the proposed method, two design cases of robotic manufacturing systems are presented for demonstration.