Towards Reconfigurable Production Systems and Technologies in the Manufacturing industries: A Framework

There is an increasing need to ensure reconfiguration of production systems and their enabling technologies due to the dynamics of market forces and production requirements. This study presents a framework that can be employed for ensuring the reconfiguration of production systems. The framework identifies the necessary requirements for reconfiguration and provides analytical model equations for calculating the different types of flexibilities namely machine, routing, process, product and volume flexibilities. A practical example was also illustrated to demonstrate how machine’s flexibility can be determined during the assembly operation of a railcar subsystems with the use of a reconfigurable production system. This study provides theoretical and practical guidelines that can assist manufacturing industries in their quest to achieve reconfiguration of production systems in a cost and time effective manner.