Optimal design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

A reconfigurable system is a system which may allow the service continuity under failure, on the basis of a reduced level of functionality. In such a system, when one component fails the rest of the system keeps working with some acceptable performance degradation. To distinguish between the normal behavior and the degraded one, the production rate is used as a performance measure. Two optimization problems dealing with reconfigurable systems are addressed. We consider a series system consisting of N stochastically independent components. Different technologies are assumed to be available for each component. The following design problems are studied: (i) Find the configuration which allows maximizing the production rate of the system under resource constraints. (ii) Find the configuration that allows to reach some predetermined level of production rate at minimal cost.