Reconfiguration Process Design of a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System Using Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a 3D graphics simulation environment for the analysis and design evaluation of a layout reconfiguration process of the reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS). Manufacturing cells (MCs) in the RMS are positioned to minimize a total distance of transport paths for a given manufacturing layout. After the end of current manufacturing process, the MCs start to move to each position in the optimal layout of next manufacturing process. The positioning and timing of the MCs in the reconfiguration process were designed by a reconfigurable process design method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). From the simulation results, the effectiveness of the reconfiguration process design method based on PSO was confirmed