A new Robustness index for machines selection in Reconfigurable Manufacturing System
Résumé
Responsiveness and high performance are key factors in today world which is driven by economic globalization. Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) is one of the recent manufacturing paradigms driven by these factors. In such paradigm, system capacities and functionalities can be changed exactly when needed as needed. Hence, the design of such systems is driven by the requirement of the production process, the specification of the needed product, and the capabilities offered by the reconfigurable machines. This paper considers the design problem in Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) and introduce a new index of system robustness. We present a new approach of RMS design to ensure the best process plans by selecting the best set of machines from a set of available (candidate) ones. The approach is based on an adapted non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) guided by the minimization of two objectives which are the total completion time and the perturbation caused by the unpredicted unavailability of selected machines (caused by failure, maintenance, human or technological errors...).The application of presented approach is illustrated through a numerical example and the discussion about the obtained results.