Configuration optimization method of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Abstract

In the study, the dynamic variability of reconfigurable manufacturing systems has been addressed and the optimization scheme of component reconfiguration has been also presented. According to the product line process changes, the production line configuration for different products has been identified; stage as a unit, the system reconfiguration path model based graph theory is built up; the weight of each edge is defined according to economic, time and process constraints and the genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize and obtain the optimal/suboptimal reconfiguration path from one configuration to another configuration of multi-stage production line. At last, an actual example, a manufacturing line composed of three RMTs, is also presented. The results show that the methodology can concurrently optimize the process plans and configurations with high computation efficiency. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.