Reconfigurable manufacturing system: Key to smart manufacturing

Abstract. Revolution in traditional manufacturing paradigms has become a prerequisite in the 21st centuries manufacturing environment. Globalization currently drives the personalization and customization of products. To be competitive companies have to enhance with the changing market environments by producing low-cost products with high quality that are efficiently responding to market unpredictability. Types of traditional manufacturing systems that are evolved due to changing manufacturing requirements are such as cellular, dedicated and flexible manufacturing systems. Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) characteristics have the competence to solve the difficulties that arise due to changing market requirements. This paper explores the next-generation manufacturing perspective considering smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and RMS. An industrial case study of RMS part family formation is presented to propose the advantages of using RMS in comparison with existing manufacturing systems. RMS configuration is a flow line layout type hence, the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) and Shortest Common Supersequence (SCS) between two operation sequences plays a significant role in RMS part family formation. In this work, the similarity between two parts is evaluated by applying LCS and SCS-based part family formation methodology, and an average linkage clustering algorithm is implemented to group parts in a family. The jobs under consideration are evaluated based on their operation sequence and geometric features. The dendrogram and threshold trend are presented to illustrate the step-by-step creation of the dendrogram.