Considering cost and convertibility during the design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Manufacturing systems are confronted to rapidly changing market requirements. Thus, they need to frequently integrate new variants of products. For classical dedicated manufacturing systems, this adaptation is highly costly and often requires to replace machines and transportation devices by other ones. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) were designed to handle the rapidly evolving demand. The convertibility is one of their key features. It focuses on the introduction of new variants in a family of products, by using reconfigurable material. Increasing the convertibility of a system also contributes to its sustainability, by enabling the use of machines and transportation devices throughout several evolutions of variants, increasing life duration of the system. The convertibility of a system is obviously highly impacted by its initial design defining the cost, productivity and flexibility of the system. The existing convertibility measures are designed to measure the convertibility of an existing system. In this paper, we propose an approach that enables one to drive the design of the RMS considering both its convertibility and its costs. We present a bi-objective mixed integer linear program which decides the type, the quantity and the assignment of equipment (production machines and transportation devices) to be implemented in the system at the design phase. We provide numerical experiments to test our approach and we give managerial insights.