A Tool for the Comparison of Concept Designs of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) deserve the interest of both academics and practitioners, as they allow manufacturing companies to deal with unpredictable market requirements, which is increasingly important. Moreover, the availability of Industry 4.0 technologies promises to support RMS and turn them into Cyber-Physical Systems. However, practitioners still need guidance and tools to design and build RMS. To pursue any investment strategy in these systems, companies need to be adequately aware of RMS’ benefits, since the initial stage of RMS design. To this end, this research focuses on the evaluation of concept designs of RMS, which should precede the investment in the detailed design and be sufficiently comprehensive on one hand, and as practical as possible to engage practitioners on the other hand. For this reason, a tool combining Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Pugh Matrix methods is proposed for fast and effective comparison of concept designs of RMS. Being part of an industry project, the tool has been validated in an actual context of development of RMS concept designs.