Real-time teaming of multiple reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Personalized production poses new challenges on reconfigurable manufacturing systems due to a dramatic increase in the variety and stochasticity of the manufacturing demand. This paper proposes a connected autonomous reconfigurable manufacturing system with a decentralized management of individual autonomous lines that can be reconfigured for diverse manufacturing tasks via manufacturing modules. We present a mathematical approach for distributing the stochastic demands and exchanging machines or modules among lines (which are groups of machines) as a bidding process, and for adaptively configuring these lines and machines for the resulting shared demand under a limited inventory of configurable components. (C) 2018 CIRP. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.