Module-based machinery design: a method to support the design of modular machine families for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Increased demand for a greater variety of products has forced many companies to rethink their strategies to offer more product variants without sacrificing production efficiency. Consequently, to satisfy this demand for customized products in shorter lead time and lower costs, production systems must be highly reactive and reconfigurable. In this context, the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) emerged in the late 1990s to overcome the limitations of traditional manufacturing in rapidly and cost-efficiently respond to changing market conditions. However, the traditional development process of special-purpose machines to meet the requirements of change turned into an expensive and time-consuming task, challenging practitioners and scholars for reducing the impact of variety on the manufacturing costs. In order to aid the transition towards the reconfigurability from an engineering design perspective, this article introduces the Module-Based Machinery Design, a method to support the conceptual and system-level design of modular machine families for RMS. The contributions of this research include (i) the organization of existing methods and techniques for designing module-based product families into a coherent framework intended for developing machine families for RMS. (ii) The proposition of a design method that accomplishes the majority of RMS characteristics through the use of modularity. (iii) The introduction of the Adherence Index, a measure to indicate the level of utilization of basic, auxiliary and adaptive modules within a module-based machine variant. (iv) Finally, the analytical evidence of an RMS implementation through the design process of a family of modular floor level palletizers.