In today’s global and volatile market, manufacturing enterprises are subjected to intense global competition, increasingly shortened product lifecycles and increased product customization and tailoring while being pressured to maintain a high degree of cost-efficiency. As a consequence, production organizations are required to introduce more new product models and variants into existing production setups, leading to more frequent ramp-up and ramp-down scenarios when transitioning from an outgoing product to a new one. In order to cope with such as challenge, the setup of the production systems needs to shift towards reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS), making production capable of changing its function and capacity according to the product and customer demand. Consequently, this study presents a simulation-based multi-objective optimization approach for system re-configuration of multi-part flow lines subjected to scalable capacities, which addresses the assignment of the tasks to workstations and buffer allocation for simultaneously maximizing throughput and minimizing total buffer capacity to cope with fluctuating production volumes. To this extent, the results from the study demonstrate the benefits that decision-makers could gain, particularly when they face trade-off decisions inherent in today’s manufacturing industry by adopting a Simulation-Based Multi-Objective Optimization (SMO) approach.

In today’s uncertain and competitive market, where manufacturing enterprises are subjected to increasingly shortened product lifecycles and frequent volume changes, reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) applications play significant roles in the success of the manufacturing industry. Despite the advantages offered by RMSs, achieving high efficiency constitutes a challenging task for stakeholders and decision makers when they face the trade-off decisions inherent in these complex systems. This study addresses work task and resource allocations to workstations together with buffer capacity allocation in an RMS. The aim is to simultaneously maximize throughput and to minimize total buffer capacity under fluctuating production volumes and capacity changes while considering the stochastic behavior of the system. An enhanced simulation-based multi-objective optimization (SMO) approach with customized simulation and optimization components is proposed to address the abovementioned challenges. Apart from presenting the optimal solutions subject to volume and capacity changes, the proposed approach supports decision makers with knowledge discovery to further understand RMS design. In particular, this study presents a customized SMO approach combined with a novel flexible pattern mining method for optimizing an RMS and conducts post-optimal analyses. To this extent, this study demonstrates the benefits of applying SMO and knowledge discovery methods for fast decision support and production planning of an RMS.

Current market requirements force manufacturing companies to face production changes more often than ever before. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are considered a key enabler in today’s manufacturing industry to cope with such dynamic and volatile markets. The literature confirms that the use of simulation-based multi-objective optimization offers a promising approach that leads to improvements in RMS. However, due to the dynamic behavior of real-world RMS, applying conventional optimization approaches can be very time-consuming, specifically when there is no general knowledge about the quality of solutions. Meanwhile, Pareto-optimal solutions may share some common design principles that can be discovered with data mining and machine learning methods and exploited by the optimization. In this study, the authors investigate a novel knowledge-driven optimization (KDO) approach to speed up the convergence in RMS applications. This approach generates generalized knowledge from previous scenarios, which is then applied to improve the efficiency of the optimization of new scenarios. This study applied the proposed approach to a multi-part flow line RMS that considers scalable capacities while addressing the tasks assignment to workstations and the buffer allocation problems. The results demonstrate how a KDO approach leads to convergence rate improvements in a real-world RMS case.

In today's uncertain and competitive market, where enterprises are subjected to increasingly shortened product life-cycles and frequent volume changes, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) applications play a significant role in the manufacturing industry's success. Despite the advantages offered by RMS, achieving a high-efficiency degree constitutes a challenging task for stakeholders and decision-makers when they face the trade-off decisions inherent in these complex systems. This study addresses work tasks and resource allocations to workstations together with buffer capacity allocation in RMS. The aim is to simultaneously maximize throughput and minimize total buffer capacity under fluctuating production volumes and capacity changes while considering the stochastic behavior of the system. An enhanced simulation-based multi-objective optimization (SMO) approach with customized simulation and optimization components is proposed to address the abovementioned challenges. Apart from presenting the optimal solutions subject to volume and capacity changes, the proposed approach support decision-makers with discovered knowledge to further understand the RMS design. In particular, this study presents a problem-specific customized SMO combined with a novel flexible pattern mining method for optimizing RMS and conducting post-optimal analyzes. To this extent, this study demonstrates the benefits of applying SMO and knowledge discovery methods for fast decision-support and production planning of RMS.