A quantitative performance measurement regarding reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The reconfiguration process is used for manufacturing system to improve the system's performance due to new circumstances. The new circumstance means changing in the marketing demand, changing in a product design, and/or introducing a new product. Reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) has potential quantitative and qualitative measures. As manufacturing firms (companies) has a great impact on the performance of a manufacturing system, the selection of the objectives to measure the performance will be achieved appropriately. These objectives have the critical requirements for a RMS and they are: cost, response, system productivity, people behavior, inventory, and quality. Since each criterion measure in a RMS is a potential source of evaluation, it should be considered as a relative weight as the others. First, it will be measured individually. Second, these measures need to be evaluated through an aggregate quantitative metric because there is a lack of analytical techniques to analyze and evaluate both qualitative and quantitative measures. A new quantitative metric for evaluation the RMS regarding updating (upgrading) the system for next period based on the previous one is presented in this paper to measure the reconfiguration methodology [1]. The new metric will be demonstrated through a numerical example.