Toward a resilient manufacturing system

Resilience often refers to a property of social and ecological systems. Recently, resilience is applied to engineered systems, referring to their capability to recover their functions after partial damage to lead to successes from failures. In this paper, the concept of engineering resilience is revisited and clarified. A new definition of the general production system is proposed, upon which the concept of the resilient manufacture system (RMS) is proposed. Furthermore, four guidelines for design and management of the RMS are proposed. Examples are discussed to illustrate the applications of these guidelines toward the RMS. (C) 2011 CIRP.