Decision Support System for Joint Product Design and Reconfiguration of Production Systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are designed to be able to be reconfigured to produce new items. Nevertheless, reconfigurations of a RMS may be time consuming and costly if they are not considered since early steps of new item design. This work describes a decision support system to automatically generate and test configurations for such RMSs based on a computer-aided design (CAD) model of a new product. The proposed methodology consists of two main steps. First, a matrix of possible assembly plans (taking into account resource/tool compatibility, geometric constraints,.) is generated with a skill-based comparison between the new item and the production resources. Second, the assembly plan with minimum reconfiguration cost is found through mathematical optimization. The solution is analyzed by a simulation model in the end. Experiments performed on small use case validate the proposed methodology.