Modelling and solving approaches for scheduling problems in reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) intend to bridge the gap between dedicated and flexible manufacturing systems. If the literature is mainly focused on the design step and tactical planning of such systems, few research projects have addressed scheduling at the operational level. While setup times may occur in flexible manufacturing systems, reconfiguration times considered in RMS may affect several resources at once, and hence require specific modelling and solving approaches to be considered. This paper first formalises the problem at hand through integer linear programming. An iterative search method is then provided to obtain solutions to larger-scale instances. Results obtained on generated instances show that managing even few possible configurations can yield significant improvements in solutions' quality. Meanwhile, the extended search space implied by the increase in available configurations hinders the convergence to a good solution in a reasonable computation time, which suggests further investigations.

Automated summary

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) aim to bridge the gap between dedicated and flexible manufacturing systems. While most literature focuses on the design and tactical planning of RMS, there is limited research on operational-level scheduling. This paper formalizes the problem through integer linear programming and proposes an iterative search method for larger-scale instances. Results show that managing even a few configurations can significantly improve solution quality, but the extended search space poses challenges for finding good solutions within a reasonable computation time.