Extended Production Planning of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems by Means of Simulation-based Optimization

Abstract

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are capable of adjusting their operating point to the requirements of current customer demand with high degrees of freedom. In light of recent events, such as the covid crisis or the chip crisis, this reconfigurability proves to be crucial for efficient manufacturing of goods. Reconfigurability aims thereby not only at adjust production capacities but also for fast integration of new product variants or technologies. However, the operation of such systems is linked to high efforts concerning manual work in production planning and control. Simulation-based optimization provides the possibility to automate processes in production planning and control with the advantage of relying on mostly existing models such as material flow simulations. This paper studies the capabilities of the meta heuristics evolutionary algorithm, linear annealing and tabu search to automate the search for optimal production reconfiguration strategies. Two distinct use cases are regarded: an increase of customer demand and the introduction of a previously unknown product variant. A parametrized material flow simulation is used as function approximator for the optimizers, whereby the production system's structure as well as logic are target variables of the optimizers. The analysis shows that meta-heuristics find good solutions in a short time with only little manual configuration needed. Thus, metaheuristics illustrate the potential to automate the production planning of RMS. However, the results indicate that the performance of the three meta-heuristics considering optimization quality and speed differs strongly.