Track: Production Engineering

Abstract

The preservation of a company’s place on the market in such aggressive competition is becoming a survival challenge for manufacturers. In this context, survivors are only those who succeed in satisfying their customers’ needs as quickly as possible. The production system should be endowed with a certain level of flexibility to eliminate or reduce the rigidity of the production systems in order to facilitate the conversion and/or the change of system’s features to produce different products. Therefore, it is essential to guarantee the quality, the speed and the flexibility to survive in this competition. According to literature, this adaptability is referred to as the notion of "change". Indeed, companies are trying to establish a more flexible and agile manufacturing system through several reconfiguration actions. Reconfiguration contributes to the extension of the manufacturing system life cycle by modifying its physical, organizational and computer characteristics according to the changing market conditions. This paper offers a generic model for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS). High-level meta-models for structure, configuration and operations will be presented using the systems modelling language SysML.