Self-reconfigurable manufacturing system for personalized mass customisation

One of the expected benefits of Industry 4.0 is the ability of production systems to effectively produce personalized products for a relatively small lot size in the same assembly line without trade-offs for cost, delivery time and quality. In this case, individual product will be unique and require a production system that is optimized for single lot size (lot-size-of-one). Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS)is an attractive choice for this. However, reconfiguration processes are not automated and not real-time, which sometimes requiring days, thereby making it economically and functionally unfit for personalized mass customisation. To achieve this, Self-Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (SRMS) is proposed in this paper and implemented in-silico using nature inspired models and algorithms. In our implementation, resource re-configuration is both automatic and immediate. The system is evaluated by measuring total production output, system stability and average lead-time per order during production and during unexpected changes like resource breakdown. This approach is expected to proffer solution to the batch-size-of-one problem in manufacturing and engender personalized mass customisation.