Intelligent and self-reconfigurable manufacturing system

Abstract

Customer demand and profit potential have pushed companies to offer diverse customization options in their products and move towards mass customization. To move towards mass customization reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) have been prosed as a solution. However, it comes with challenges, including labor, costs, time, and complexity. Introducing intelligence, smartness and state-of-the-art industry 4.0 technologies into reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) can be a solution to these challenges. Combining these concepts can be used to develop an intelligent RMS that can be automatically reconfigured without any human intervention. In this paper, a novel architecture has been proposed that explains all the details from the idealization phase to design and physical implementation. The architecture covers individual elements of the RMS, introduces the technologies that enable intelligence and follows through the steps that add up to the complete functionality of the system. In addition, we propose an intelligent process that automates the reconfiguration phase of our proposal. Based on this architecture and intelligent reconfiguration, a physical demonstration is also presented that shows how the system can be implemented. The constructed system is demonstrated as an intelligent RMS capable of mass customization without human effort.