Process Plan Generation in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems using AMOSA and TOPSIS

Reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a recent manufacturing paradigm that responses to market changes cost-effectively. RMS consists mainly of reconfigurable machines, each of which has multiple configurations. In this paper we address the problem of process plan generation in RMS taking into account the multi-configuration nature of machines, in a multi-objective aspect. More specifically, we adapt AMOSA (Archived Multi-Objective Simulated Annealing) metaheuristic, to generate a set of non-dominated solutions, based on three criteria: completion time, total cost and reconfiguration effort. After that, TOPSIS method is used to rank these solutions in a preferential order.