Brownfield Design of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Architectures: An Application of a Modified MFD to the Capital Goods Industry

Although the concept of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) has reached its 20th anniversary, it has only grown in relevance. However, the principles are only applied scarcely, although industry recognize the benefits. The transition is limited by a lack of methods which support the practical design of reconfigurable and modular architectures of manufacturing systems and their constituents in brownfield contexts. To address these issues, recent research proposes to modify the Modular Function Deployment (MFD) with a revised set of drivers and tools. Therefore, this paper presents a modified MFD with value-chain considerations and supportive tools, which is validated in an industrial case.