The increasing complexity of modern manufacturing, coupled with demand fluctuation, supply chain uncertainties, and product customization, underscores the need for manufacturing systems that can flexibly update their configurations and swiftly adapt to disturbances. However, current research falls short in providing a holistic reconfigurable manufacturing framework that seamlessly monitors system disturbances, optimizes alternative line configurations based on machine capabilities, and automates simulation evaluation for swift adaptations. This paper presents a dynamic manufacturing line reconfiguration framework to handle disturbances that result in operation time changes. The framework incorporates a system process digital twin for monitoring disturbances and triggering reconfigurations, a capability-based ontology model capturing available agent and resource options, a configuration optimizer generating optimal line configurations, and a simulation generation program initializing simulation setups and evaluating line configurations at approximately 400x real-time speed. A case study of a battery production line has been conducted to evaluate the proposed framework. In two implemented disturbance scenarios, the framework successfully recovers system throughput with limited resources, preventing the 26% and 63% throughput drops that would have occurred without a reconfiguration plan. The reconfiguration optimizer efficiently finds optimal solutions, taking an average of 0.03 seconds to find a reconfiguration plan for a manufacturing line with 51 operations and 40 available agents across 8 agent types.

In today's uncertain and competitive market, where enterprises are subjected to increasingly shortened product life-cycles and frequent volume changes, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) applications play a significant role in the manufacturing industry's success. Despite the advantages offered by RMS, achieving a high-efficiency degree constitutes a challenging task for stakeholders and decision-makers when they face the trade-off decisions inherent in these complex systems. This study addresses work tasks and resource allocations to workstations together with buffer capacity allocation in RMS. The aim is to simultaneously maximize throughput and minimize total buffer capacity under fluctuating production volumes and capacity changes while considering the stochastic behavior of the system. An enhanced simulation-based multi-objective optimization (SMO) approach with customized simulation and optimization components is proposed to address the abovementioned challenges. Apart from presenting the optimal solutions subject to volume and capacity changes, the proposed approach support decision-makers with discovered knowledge to further understand the RMS design. In particular, this study presents a problem-specific customized SMO combined with a novel flexible pattern mining method for optimizing RMS and conducting post-optimal analyzes. To this extent, this study demonstrates the benefits of applying SMO and knowledge discovery methods for fast decision-support and production planning of RMS.

The paper describes a novel use of planning in Reconfigurable Manufacturing. Authors considered the nodes of a manufacturing plant as individual AI-based agents able to reason on continuously updated representation of their domain model, plan their own actions, and execute them. The paper aims at clarifying the role of planning, its connection with both a goal selection mechanism, and the agent's knowledge. It describes in detail how a planning system has been customized for the task of planning and execution and shows results of a realistic simulation on a manufacturing plant.