Capacity adjustment of job shop manufacturing systems with RMTs

With world competition and enhanced globalization, manufacturers are confronted with the challenge to satisfy customer demands quickly and flexibly. Moreover, it renders the production systems complex and dynamical. Capacity adjustment is one approach to deal with the fluctuation in demand and improve competitiveness of manufacturer. In this work, we derive an extended mathematical model of a typical job shop manufacturing system by introducing Reconfigurable Machine Tools (RMTs) to analyze the impact of this new class of machine tools on the dynamic behavior of the system. To improve the ability of capacity adjustment, we include the operations of RMTs into the classical Proportional Integrate Derivative (PID) controller. Simulation results of a four-workstation job shop system demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and show the potential of RMTs in the context of Industry 4.0.