Abstract
The effect of the configuration selection on the smoothness and easiness of manufacturing systems reconfiguration process cannot be neglected, especially when dealing with reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). The term "reconfiguration smoothness" is introduced in this paper to address this issue. In order to evaluate the level of reconfiguration smoothness (RS), a metric was developed to provide a relative measure of the expected cost, time, and effort required to convert from one configuration to another. This metric is composed of three components representing different levels of reconfiguration, namely; market-level reconfiguration smoothness (TRS), system-level reconfiguration smoothness (SRS), and machine-level reconfiguration smoothness (MRS). Rules are introduced to guide the development of execution plans for system-level reconfiguration, which we call "reconfiguration planning". These plans help reduce the physical effort of reconfiguring the system. A case study is presented to demonstrate the use of the developed metric followed by sensitivity analysis to show the effect of changing different metric parameters. The results show how the developed metric provides a powerful relative assessment tool for the transitional smoothness between a current configuration and a number of candidate feasible configurations for the next period. This can affect the configuration selection decisions at the beginning of each configuration period.