Title: Application of reconfigurable machine tools in the capacity control of job shop systems

Authors: Ping Liu; Qiang Zhang; Jürgen Pannek

Addresses: International Graduate School for Dynamics in Logistics, Faculty of Production Engineering, University of Bremen, Germany ' International Graduate School for Dynamics in Logistics, Faculty of Production Engineering, University of Bremen, Germany ' Faculty of Production Engineering, BIBA Bremer Institute für Produktion und Logistik, University of Bremen, Germany

Abstract: In today's market, demand fluctuation is a big challenge for manufacturers. They have to respond quickly and flexibly to satisfy customers' demands to improve competitiveness. Moreover, it renders the production systems complex and dynamical. In this paper, we use capacity adjustment to deal with the fluctuation in demand. We derive an extended mathematical model of a typical job shop manufacturing system by introducing reconfigurable machine tools (RMTs) to analyse the impact of this new class of machine tools on the dynamic behaviour of the system. To improve the ability of capacity adjustment, we include the operations of RMTs into the classical proportional integral derivative (PID) controller. Simulation results of a four-workstation job shop system demonstrate the proposed method can adjust the capacity effectively and show the potential of RMTs in the context of Industry 4.0.

Keywords: capacity adjustment; control theory; reconfigurable machine tools; RMTs; job shop systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2018.094301

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2018 Vol.11 No.3, pp.206 - 221

Received: 22 Apr 2017
Accepted: 23 Mar 2018
Published online: 28 Aug 2018 *

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