Abstract
Engineering technology deals with the development and implementation of engineering and technology. Engineering technology education focuses on providing more specialized and applied engineering education, as opposed to theoretical knowledge. Consequently, institutions providing engineering technology education curricula need to develop applied courses that take advantage of recent advancements in automation, information and communication technologies to show integration, interoperability, modularity and flexibility in modern manufacturing environments. Since the late 1990s, the reconfigurable manufacturing paradigm has been introduced to extend the flexibilities and capabilities of modem manufacturing systems. Unfortunately, in scientific literature, there is still a lack of works that describe success stories related to the application of the reconfigurable manufacturing paradigm in engineering technology education. This article provides a case study that takes advantage of the reconfigurable manufacturing paradigm to introduce students to the complex tasks of design and operation of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). The article describes how a course is designed based on project management methodology in order to get students faced with the complexity of designing, implementing, assessing the performance and operating an RMS. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.