A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is one capable of changing its functionality or capacity by changing the type of product manufactured or the throughput of production. Since its introduction, RMS emerged as one of the promising manufacturing paradigms and changed how we perceived different manufacturing activities, such as scheduling and process planning.
Process planning can be defined as the activity of converting a product design into manufacturing steps, consisting of operations sequence and the parameters where these operations will be processed.
We can identify two types of Process planning: single-unit (SUPP) and multi-unit (MUPP). The difference is that in the MUPP, we generate multiple process plans for multiple units executed sequentially instead of just one in the SUPP case.
The SUPP problem has been abundantly studied in the literature, either in conventional manufacturing systems or in reconfigurable ones. On the other hand, MUPP problems received little interest, especially in the RMS context; we can mention from a few.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows: i) Developing a mathematical model for SUPP and MUPP problems, ii) Proposing a tradeoff approach called Repetitive-SUPP (R-SUPP), iii) Evaluating the mathematical models performance.