Operation Management in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems: Reconfiguration for Error Handling

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems offer quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality in responseto unpredictable market changes as being systems designed at the outset for rapid change in system configuration, itsmachines and controls. During the production process, out-of-ordinary events occur dynamically and unpredictablyboth at the system (machine breakdowns, change in job’s priorities, etc.) and at the cell level (tool failures, robotcollisions, etc.). Such exceptions interrupt the production process by causing errors in the schedule plan (system level) orin the task plan (cell level). Error handling is the policy meant for reacting to errors caused by the occurrence of out-ofordinaryevents. The reconfiguration ability turns out to be the new technological factor enabling new strategies tohandle out-of-ordinary events of the production process. Both economic and performance aspects need to be consideredin order to make a decision in support of particular error handling policies such as using reconfiguration. This paper,starting from a simulation case study, highlights advantage of using reconfiguration for error handling. Authors proposean object-oriented high-level control structure for real-time error handling, which integrates the new reconfiguration forerror handling technology with the existing reactive scheduling system.