New Heuristic for Setup Plan Generation and Multi Tool Modules Selection in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are designed to overcome the deficiencies of other conventional manufacturing systems in terms of sudden change in market demand or product customization. Setup planning in conventional manufacturing systems is performed based on machining capabilities of the system. When the setup planning of new part is carried out with in the same system, changes are made in the existing system. Sometimes these modifications may not be economically feasible and lead to the reduction of system efficiency. In RMS, the Reconfigurable Machine Tools (RMTs) are capable of reconfiguration, in terms of functionality and capabilities, to cope with the future changes in the system. While the concept of enriched features gives us enough data by which we can plan for the part with its part specification data, without considering the system's resources or capabilities. This work addresses the problem of setup planning for a part on machine in a reconfigurable environment. A mathematical model is developed, to achieve the objective of cost minimization, for setup planning by considering the cost attributes of operation processing, tolerance stack-up, setup change and tool module change costs. A new heuristic is developed for setup planning. In its first step, it generates set of operations/setups based on ranking and priority. In the second step, RMTs and tool modules are selected for performing the given operations of each setup in the setup plan. To check the efficiency of proposed approach, it is tested on the part example and results are discussed with proposed future work.