A systematic approach for responsiveness assessment for product and material flow in reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS)

Abstract A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) quickly changes machine configurations to adapt to variations in demand related to volume of product and design. A decision of machine configuration change is taken after considering many factors, such as time, effort and cost. This research proposes a systematic approach for responsiveness assessment for product and material flow in reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) by considering product and process characteristics. The proposed system uses three important metrics, namely reconfiguration effort, reconfiguration time and non-productive reconfiguration cost. The usefulness of the developed system is demonstrated with the help of an industrial case study of three hypereutectic aluminium automotive pistons from the same part family. These pistons are made of FM-425 aluminium alloy that contains 16.5 percent of silicon. The system is suitable for comparing and selecting efficient machine configurations in a reconfigurable manufacturing system.