PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF RECONFIGURABLE ABLY LINE

Abstract

To meet the diversified customer demand and to cater to dynamic market situation, there is an urgent need to develop a manufacturing system that gives cost effective response to changing market situations. Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) is the most suitable system in such an environment. Since, Reconfigurable Assembly Line (RAL) is a type of Reconfigurable manufacturing system. In this work these two terms will be used interchangeably. In the present work, model for the reconfigurable manufacturing system has been proposed. RMS allows the essential flexibility not only in producing a variety of parts, but also in configuring a system itself. Such a system is developed using basic process modules of hardware and software that can be rearranged quickly and reliably. In RMS, reconfigurability can be achieved at system level, machine level and control level. At system level, reconfigurability can achieve by changing the configuration of machines according to changing market demand. Performance evaluation of different configurations is important to know the suitability of various configurations against the changed situation. In the present work, different configurations of RMS has been modeled and simulated using a manufacturing system simulator PROMODEL The effects of different configurations for variable' number of resources, buffer capacities and AGV allocation policies on different performance measures such as throughput, work-in-process, manufacturing lead time, machine utilization and AGV utilization has been determined. Reliability, cost and reconfigurability analysis of different symmetric configurations of RMS by considering machine level data has also been done by developing a user interactive program using MATLAB.