Reconfigurable manufacturing systems

This tool supports the design and evaluation of reconfigurable production cells. The goal is to determine possible equipment strategies based on investments and re(arrangement) of manufacturing resources in an environment with high uncertainty. The inputs to this tool are a database with the feasible equipment (technology, capacity, investment, need of space) and information of the products to be manufactured (product structure, demand & variability, sequence & flexibility, cycle times). The output is a solution set of feasible combinations of flexible and reconfigurable production cells and its calculated performances. The tool enables to explore the trade-off between investments and performance, thus helping to identify a target of flexibility and formulate an equipment strategy. Once flexibility is available on hardware level, it should help to leverage robustness at the plant level.