Track: Automation and Agility
Abstract
Abstract: The manufacturing industry has a high potential of being exposed to continuous market changes that need to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing market environment. Therefore, the ability to cope with these factors is vital. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) have a cost-effective response to rapid changes, as well as have the capability to cope with market changes (due to the variation in customer and supplier behaviors) by adapting to various manufacturing systems. In this paper the authors present a method to assess and choose the appropriate manufacturing design layout. Three different configurations have been designed using the CAD program SOLIDWORKS; the configurations were compared using ARENA 14.7 simulation software to simulate the process of manufacturing a product. The configurations were then evaluated using various performance measures, including resource utilization, waiting time and throughput. The evaluation was used to identify the appropriate configuration design. The results show that the proposed methodology can offer a suitable configuration that can achieve high performance as well as adapt to market changes.