Planning the reconfiguration of manufacturing systems: A literature review

The diffusion of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) is envisioned as a potential lever for manufacturing firms to gain competitive advantage. In fact, responsiveness is required in the current context characterized by unpredictable frequent market changes and demand for increasingly individualized products with shortened life cycles. Reconfigurability is a well cited capability because it promises to allow high responsiveness. Many authors point out that, to be really market-able, RMSs need to have convenient reconfiguration time and cost. To this end, a great synergy between the reconfigurability and the process of planning the reconfiguration should be exploited: this is the main reflection that the present paper is bringing based on a literature review. More in details, the paper describes the characteristics of reconfigurability; besides, it elaborates on the reconfigurability as a capability, having a particular focus on the scalability characteristic and its relationship with the planning process. The reflection provided in the paper allows to get an overview of the need to structure the process of planning the reconfiguration within RMSs