Comparison of Three Reconfiguration Levers to Optimize a Reconfigurable Production Workshop

The problem studied focuses on the facility layout problem (FLP) that arises in reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). The goal is to optimize the distance traveled by an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) to move products between several workstations. The proposed solving approach takes into account the empty and loaded trips made by the robot. Three reconfiguration levers are evaluated: the location of the machine in the workshop (i.e layout), its orientation, and its shape. We use the simulated annealing meta-heuristic to tackle this NP-hard problem. The results obtained on a set of 25-worstations instances highlight the value of orientation changes compared to the other two levers.