A novel methodology to measure the responsiveness of RMTs in reconfigurable manufacturing system

•This paper presents a methodology to access RMT responsiveness.•Responsiveness is derived from operational capability and machine reconfigurability.•Responsiveness would help the management to enhance the decision quality in the RMS.

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems are designed to deliver exact functionality and capacity that is needed, when it is needed. The reconfigurable machine tool (RMT) plays a pivotal role in the accomplishment of this objective through their built in modular structure consisting of basic and auxiliary modules along with the open architecture software.The RMTs can perform variety of operations in their existing configurations and their functionality can further be changed by just changing their modules. In such an environment each operation can be performed by many feasible machine configurations offering different responsiveness values. Optimally assigning machines in the RMS based on only cost, may lead to higher reconfiguration efforts required in the later stages and reduced responsiveness of the system. Therefore the inherent ability of an RMT to handle the market fluctuations should be given due consideration along with the cost. Though in literature the system convertibility has been discussed for the variety of machine layouts but the literature lacks in the suitable performance metrics for assessing the responsiveness of RMTs on machine level.In the present research work a novel methodology is developed to assess the responsiveness of an RMT through developing the operational capability and machine reconfigurability metrics. The developed approach has been numerically illustrated and it has been observed that with a marginal increase in the cost, the RMTs offering higher responsiveness are available for the required operations.