Towards practical, high-level guidelines to promote company strategy for the use of reconfigurable manufacturing automation

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) and more specifically reconfigurable manufacturing automation systems (RMAS) represent an industrial production paradigm that has evolved in the last twenty years, and provide a low cost solution in the presence of product variety. In spite of the potential impact of this approach to industrial competitiveness, the literature still lacks a set of structured guidelines, derived from the theory and from field studies, to promote its practical implementation in industry. In this paper some early results that contribute towards addressing this research gap are presented. A set of practical guidelines is derived and compiled from four sources: a literature review; a structured questionnaire survey on the attitude of industry to RMAS based on 55 respondents from various sectors of the manufacturing industry; unstructured interviews with the survey respondents to discuss the barriers to the implementation of RMAS; and lessons learned from three pilot industrial test cases where the feasibility of implementing a new RMAS was investigated. The portion of the work reported herein deals exclusively with high level and over-arching practical implementation aspects of RMAS, rather than detailed design and development aspects. The guidelines are validated through further feedback from industry.