Abstract
Manufacturing systems need to be designed to cope with products' variety and frequent changes in market requirements. Switching between product families in different production periods often requires reconfiguration of the manufacturing system with associated additional cost and interruption of production. A mixed integer linear programing (MILP) model is proposed to synthesize manufacturing systems based on the co-platforming methodology taking into consideration machine level changes including addition or removal of machine axes and changing setup as well as system level changes such as addition or removal of machines. The objective is to minimize the cost of change needed for transition between product families and production periods. An illustrative numerical example and an industrial case study from tier I automotive supplier are used for verification. Finally, the effect of maintaining a common core of machines in the manufacturing system on the total capital and change cost is investigated. It has been demonstrated that synthesizing manufacturing systems designed using the co-platforming strategy reduces the total investment cost including initial cost of machines and cost of reconfiguration.