Justification for the selection of a reconfigurable manufacturing system: a fuzzy analytical hierarchy based approach

The aim of this article is to highlight a novel production system paradigm entitled the Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) and study its pre-design strategies. Here a decision-making module is established for the evaluation of existing and new generation manufacturing systems by trading off among the tangible and intangible design parameters. This difficult and time-consuming process is carried out using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a widely used process to solve multi-criteria decision-making problems. In order to capture the vagueness and uncertainty of the decision-makers' judgment, fuzzy logic is introduced into the pairwise comparison of alternatives. In order to provide the designers with a systematic framework to evaluate different alternatives to support their manufacturing system choice, in this paper a model has been proposed to quantify those features of MSs that aid in rapidly adjusting their capability to production functionality (convertibility). After providing the mathematical model to quantify the metrics of convertibility, a fuzzy logic based AHP model has been utilized to evaluate the importance of the individual matrices in measuring the system convertibility. We provide support with an effective case example.