Measuring the Relative Importance of Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) Using Best–Worst Method (BWM)

Abstract

Manufacturing companies have since been continuously facing volatile market conditions, primarily due to rapidly changing customers demand and quick introduction of new products. Therefore, to stay competitive in globally ever-changing manufacturing environment, manufacturing sectors need to adopt and implement those manufacturing systems which are capable to keep pace with the changes occurring and this is why a new concept, namely “reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS)”, has come into being. The manufacturing organizations have to meet the requirements of RMS by developing a suitable system which keeps their entity globally viable. The main objective of this paper is to identify and analyse the factors which directly or indirectly influence reconfigurable manufacturing system. In this present work, local and global weights have been calculated to measure the global ranking of all the possible RMS factors (e.g. modularity, scalability, integrability, flexibility, convertibility and diagnosability) based on which the best and worst alternatives are selected right at the design stage of RMS. All these factors have been mapped together through multi-criteria decision-making approach known as best–worst method (BWM). Finally, sensitivity analysis has been done to validate the proposed results. The proposed multi-decision approach is quite versatile from the point of view that it provides an opportunity to integrate all possible factors and sub-factors which could impact manufacturing processes.