Manufacturing has to cope with the continuously increasing variety of products, change of volumes and shortening product life cycles. These trends also affect the automotive sector: the frequent introduction of new models, materials and assembly technologies put the suppliers of make-to-order parts under pressure. In this context, the design of assembly systems and their management are of paramount importance for the companies' competitiveness. In this paper, we propose an approach for the design and reconfiguration of modular assembly systems through the integration of different computational tools addressing the design of the system, the optimization of the layout, the planning of reconfiguration actions as well as production planning. Integrating these computational tools and iterating through the resulting workflow and feedback allow to consider the outcomes and dependencies of alternative decision sequences holistically with the objective of an effective and efficient approach to production system design and management. The viability of the approach is demonstrated through the application to an automotive case study

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Automotive suppliers are facing the challenge of continuously adapting their production targets to variable demand requirements due to the frequent introduction of new model variants, materials and assembly technologies. In this context, the profitable management of the product, process and system co---evolution is of paramount importance for the company competitiveness. In this paper, a methodology for the design and reconfiguration management of modular assembly systems is proposed. It addresses the selection of the technological modules, their integration in the assembly cell, and the reconfiguration policies to handle volume and lot size variability. The results are demonstrated in a real automotive case study. Assembly System; Reconfiguration; Co---evolution.

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This paper provides an overview of the research goals and current research status of the EU-FP7 project RobustPlaNet. A description of the general concept and vision of the project is presented and the adopted definition of robustness at plant and supply chain levels are discussed. Moreover, the RobustPlaNet approach and its innovative technologies and methods are described, followed by a summary of the different industrial use cases. The architecture of the decision support cockpit that will emerge from the integration of these tools is presented. At last, the overall impact of the RobustPlaNet solution is discussed, supporting the European manufacturing industry in the transition towards shock-robust plants and supply chain