Smart Reconfigurable Manufacturing: Literature Analysis

Smart manufacturing (SM) enhances the competitiveness of manufacturing companies by promoting automation and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), targeting to produce 100% qualified products fully automatically. One of the key challenges to the SM initiatives is the continuous demand fluctuations in the specification and quantity, especially when a new product variant comes to the production line. Reconfigurable manufacturing (RM) system provides cost-effective, rapid response to abrupt market changes. It provides a solution by its flexibility in repurposing tools, adding machines, and modifying software to rapidly respond to changing demands at low unit costs. The ability of SM technologies through self-programming and cloud computation may significantly complements RM initiatives. There is increasing evidence that SM and RM may augment each other through their complementary strengths, leading to the new paradigm of smart reconfigurable manufacturing (SRM). To highlight the complementary strengths, this paper investigates the converging trend of RM and SM based on natural language processing, e.g., topic modeling and semantic embedding. Key characteristics and industrial use cases are subsequently summarized to systematically delineate the new SRM paradigm and illustrate its advantages and feasibility in practice.