A morphology proposal in commercial-off-the-shelf reconfigurable machine tools

Abstract

Global manufacturing is continuously facing changing demands, the unpredictable part family supply that a machine tool user has to deal with needs varying machine morphologies. The reconfigurable manufacturing system paradigm proposes the need for the right capacity, for the right demand with an economical ramp-up period. The machinist needs to have a systematic manner of configuring the machines, given a set of modules that will be configured and reconfigured for the various demands in the lifespan of a manufacturing system. In this article, the author proposes how the machinist can go about identifying the different morphologies in advance. The method is simple and user-friendly in consideration of the main users who may have basic skills being deficient in sophistication and complexity; it further assists in the determination of the capability the manufacturer has with the available modules.

Towards an Industry-Applicable Design Methodology for Developing Reconfigurable Manufacturing

“…The identified modules are to be included in the system design and should be modelled and simulated, to evaluate the design solution candidates through a trade-off analysis between reusing existing modules and designing new modules [45]. Third, existing modules -either internally developed at the company and/or commercially availableshould be classified through a module tree analysis [46]. A structural tree of the modules evaluates the constraints in reconfiguring the modules.…”

Decision support for design of reconfigurable rotary machining systems for family part production

“…Since the introduction of the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) by Koren et al (1999), the configuration and reconfiguration of such systems have been often discussed in the literature (Bi et al 2008;Liu and Liang 2008;Dou, Dai, and Meng 2010;Gwangwava et al 2014;Mpofu and Tlale 2014). However, these previous studies have considered different physical structures of RMS in comparison with that considered in the present paper.…”