To enable manufacturing firms adapting their manufacturing capabilities to meet the market demands in a cost-efficient way the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing was initiated. A majority of the research within this field targeting production development has been focused on greenfield development methods, enabling the developers to ignore context and constraints that brownfield development methods cannot. The greenfield focus in reconfigurability research has resulted in how to find optimal solutions to reconfiguration problems. Taking a brownfield focus on reconfigurable manufacturing development would enable to move step-by-step towards a reconfigurable manufacturing strategy instead of the all-or-nothing approach of greenfield development methods. This study investigates through a literature review what assessment tools and methods that exists in literature, and classifies them into four categories, i.e. Configuration evaluation, Element of evaluation, Pre-design evaluation, and Potential evaluation. It is found that there only exist two assessment tools for potential evaluation. Through a multiple case study, the potential evaluation process is evaluated, and three gaps is identified, i.e. lack of connection to strategy, lack of predefined goals for reconfigurability, and the difficulty in interpreting the result of the analysis. These gaps are then address in a new conceptual assessment process for assessing the potential of reconfigurability. The conceptual assessment process links the six reconfigurability characteristics throughout the whole assessment process to link manufacturing strategy to the improvement suggestions.

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The concept of the Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) was introduced for the first time almost 20 years ago as a new manufacturing system concept with functionality and capacity being dynamically changeable through modularity, integrability, diagnosability, and customization. Since its introduction, the RMS concept has been extensively researched from various perspectives and new trends are today increasing its relevance. This research revisits the current status of both RMS research -in terms of research domains and trends -and RMS practice -in terms of potentialities and limitations towards broad industry application. Based on this, a design methodology in four steps is proposed and, to ensure its industry-applicability, the existence or lack of tools for each step is summarized as a basis for future research developments.

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