Development of Reconfigurable Manufacturing System for Dynamic Manufacturing Environment: Architecture and Prototype

Abstract

Recently a dramatic change or paradigm shift in the consumer market and ICT has affected manufacturing industry significantly. Under the circumstance, reconfiguration capability dealing with the change has become a key issue for the manufacturing industry in the form of Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS).

RMS has been studied since a long time from a variety of point of view based on the technologies available at the time of study. In this thesis, RMS has been investigated from the concept of Industry 4.0 and Smart Factory emerged a few years ago by Germany. In particular, we identified reconfigurable items in terms of: 1) hardware reconfiguration or purchase, 2) software reconfiguration, 3) layout reconfiguration, 4) rerouting, etc. Based on that, we developed architecture of RMS systematically based on ISO 15288, largely composed of stakeholder requirements, system requirements, and architecture. The developed architecture was in part implemented in the test bed for smart factory under development.