Configuration Analysis And Research Of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Global competition demands manufacturing companies frequent product introductions and updates, shorter product life cycle time, and lower invest and machining cost, which has forced the traditional manufacturing systems not to be adapted in long range. A new manufacturing system-RMS (Reconfigurable Manufacturing System) has been a hot topic, which is the top one of the 20 key technologies of future manufacturing. This thesis is supported by Nation's 863 Project (No. 2001AA41260). The main contents are as follows.In Chapterl, the importance and challenge of the manufacturing industry are presented. The generation and signification of RMS are discussed and the literature view of RMS is summarized. The main contents and general structure of the thesis are given.In Chapter 2, an extensive literature review is conducted in various fields such as defines, characteristic, base science and content of RMS. And the relation contents of the configuration such as defines, classify, restriction and the relationship of machining performances and configuration is discussed in brief.In Chapter 3, the reliability predication models in machine level and system level are developed. The main of this chapter is the system level's reliability predication model in different configurations, which is developed to analyse the relationship of configuration and reliability.In Chapter 4, an estimation model of configuration's productivity is developed, based on the reliability, after analysed the advantages and the disadvantages of the configuration's productivity in Graph Theory and in Boolean function. Then an example with various configurations' productivity is discussed. A conclusion that the parallel-serial configuration is the best choice of RMS is gotten.In Chapter 5, common models about the RMS are introduced and analysed in brief. Then a cost model of the best configuration of RMS is developed and solved in AMPL. In last, an evaluation model of the reconfiguration based on the configuration similarity is developed.In Chapter 6, conclusions and the future research topics are presented in this chapter.