Traditional manufacturing paradigms cannot deal with the current pace of uncertain events in demand, supply and beyond. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) are designed to adapt to these challenges in a rapid and cost-effective way. In order to decide when and how to reconfigure an RMS, it is necessary to identify the external events which trigger change in the system. This paper proposes a framework for uncertainty representation in RMS based on three levels of uncertainty and decision horizons. An illustrative example shows how such framework can be used by researchers and practitioners to better understand RMS and its context.

Pursuing manufacturing competitiveness in the dynamic industrial landscape necessitates implementing changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) capable of rapid adaptation to varying functionalities and capacities. However, current manufacturing system development methods often overlook product-driven changes during the system's life cycle, hindering companies from effectively responding to shifting demands and technological advancements. Consequently, this research paper proposes a systematic methodology for designing and developing changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems to address this gap. The proposed methodology is derived from a synthesis of design theory, reconfigurability theory, and practical insights to guide the development process from conception to implementation. The four-step development method adopts a system life cycle-wide perspective, encompassing (i) identification and clarification of the need for reconfigurability, (ii) formulation of reconfigurable concepts, (iii) detailed design of the reconfigurable system, and (iv) successful implementation and utilization of reconfigurability. Crucially, the development method blends existing RMS development tools and novel tools co-created with industry partners, ensuring its pragmatic and holistic applicability. Each step incorporates specific activities and supporting tools, rendering the methodology flexible and adaptable to diverse manufacturing environments. The proposed methodology was validated through case studies in seven diverse manufacturing companies. The primary contributions of this research lie in integrating new and existing development tools into a comprehensive and practical development method, facilitating a system life cycle-wide approach to RMS design, and promoting industry-specific adaptability. The validation across multiple manufacturing companies ensures the effectiveness and broad applicability of the proposed methodology. Consequently, this paper is a valuable resource for manufacturing companies aiming to enhance competitiveness by adopting changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems.

Uncertainties in the global market, including supply chain disruptions, local content requirements, and geopolitical conflicts, pose significant risks to manufacturers relying on centralized production systems. Movable factories, mobile manufacturing systems (MMS), and associated frameworks have been proposed in the literature as ways to achieve resilient production networks. However, these deployable manufacturing systems' planning and management aspects remain largely overlooked. This paper explores how manufacturing companies can enhance resilience by adopting military rapid deployment planning principles to deploy production capabilities to geographically dispersed areas swiftly.

Strategic planning of industrial systems has become increasingly challenging for decision makers at different production levels, due to everal aspects, such as global competition, market uncertainty and volatility, and changing regulations. These evolving aspects often lead to unplanned and high-effort reconfigurations of systems. Additionally, high-paced innovation in industrial technologies and the diffusion of software, data analytics, and big data technologies in industrial systems, while potentially supporting ever smarter, safer, and greener decisions, also challenge decision makers, as often multi-disciplinary knowledge is required to successfully plan and operate increasingly complex systems. Existing literature provides little guidance on how strategic planning of industrial systems is expected to evolve in order to fully exploit advanced industrial technologies to responsively and cost effectively respond to global challenges. To fill this gap, this paper reviews existing literature on industrial systems' planning and reconfigurability and derivesmulti-sectorial requirements. Based on the findings, a life cycle conceptualmodel for strategic planning of reconfigurable industrial systems and value chains is provided. Moreover, the concepts of hierarchical interfaces, functional interfaces, and reconfigurability bottleneck are introduced and directions for future research are accordingly outlined.

Due to continuous focus on sustainability and circular economy, product take-back programs are becoming increasingly relevant and attractive. Thus, closed-loop manufacturing systems have to be designed and developed for disassembly, reprocessing of materials, re-assembly, and remanufacturing in a cost-efficient way. Compared to traditional manufacturing, this involves a higher need for changeability due to higher uncertainty, e.g. in terms of timing and quantity that the system needs to handle, uncertainty in quality and materials of received items, and in particular significant variety in returned items, the system should be designed to process. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate how reconfigurability, as the enabler of changeability at manufacturing system level, can be utilised to aid challenges in closed-loop manufacturing systems for product take-back. Initially, insights from an industrial case are presented regarding challenges in establishing and operating closed-loop manufacturing systems for product take-back programs. Secondly, different closed-loop manufacturing concepts applying the principles of reconfigurability are proposed and evaluated in terms of cost and robustness towards the inherent uncertainties in supplied end-of-use items. The results show significant potential of utilising a modular and platform-based approach towards meeting supply uncertainties through reconfiguration, which allows for a more efficient setup for product take-back.

This paper discusses the issue of transferring knowledge from recent research to practitioners in the fast-paced world of development. Research is often not presented in a way that is easily digestible to practitioners, leading to a lag in industry adopting new findings. The REKON dissemination format is presented as a solution to this problem making knowledge about reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) available for over 100 Danish manufacturing companies. The effectiveness of the REKON dissemination format is evaluated through surveys and initial results indicate that it has been successful in transferring knowledge about RMS and its potential to participating companies.

Nowadays, manufacturing firms need the reconfigurability capability to be responsive in the current context characterised by unpredictable and frequent market changes and the reduction of product life cycle. Despite the relevance of the subject, a challenge for practitioners is the development of a strategy aimed to increase the level of reconfigurability with long-term goals of customisation and responsiveness. Moreover, traditional manufacturing paradigms are disrupted by the transformation of manufacturing systems in cyber-physical systems (CPS), thus introducing innovative means also to increase the level of reconfigurability in manufacturing systems. This study investigates how the technologies underlying CPS support the reconfigurability capability along system life cycle. Thus the technologies underlying CPS are classified into seven categories and it is shown how they enable the sequence of utilisation of the reconfigurability characteristics (modularity, integrability, diagnosability, scalability, convertibility and customisation) along the system life cycle. The results of the study can guide practitioners in developing reconfigurability as a strategic capability. Moreover, different directions for future research can be considered, as discussed in the conclusion.

The current uncertain and volatile business context is challenging firms worldwide, leading to the need to be responsive at a competitive cost. This trend is so substantial that it even affects industries traditionally competing in rather stable contexts, such as the process industry. Although the process industry includes multiple sectors with different technologies and processes, these share several aspects that make the industry as a whole distinctive to the discrete manufacturing industry. Based on a literature review, this study identifies and describes trends leading the process industry to the need for responsiveness, corresponding solutions to accommodate the need, and related challenges hindering the industrialization and diffusion of solutions in this industry. This study shows that trends, such as the uncertainty and volatility of market requirements, are challenging the process industry to develop reconfigurability solutions across multiple production levels. The development of reconfigurability solutions is hindered by modularity, integrability, co-ordination and collaboration challenges.

The mass customisation strategy is needed by manufacturing companies to face the increasing variety and unpredictability of products required by customers. However, mass customisation may increase the complexity of managing manufacturing and production logistics activities, for example due to reduced product batch sizes. The synchronisation of material flows within the factory is emerging as a way to address this complexity, as it enables an effective and efficient implementation of mass customisation. Indeed, the fourth Industrial Revolution introduces new digital levers, which can be combined with traditional managerial levers to achieve the synchronisation of material flows within the factory. This study contributes to the rising stream of research on this topic. A systematic literature review was conducted, leading to the development of a classification framework of the levers supporting the synchronisation of material flows. The identified managerial levers are: storage of materials, feeding policy, and scheduling. The digital levers are: materials tracking, process tracking, data analytics, and assistance systems. The developed framework was operationalised in four industrial cases and applied as a tool to map their levers related to the synchronisation of material flows.

The unpredictable market scenario in the manufacturing industry demands the adoption of reconfigurability enablers. These enablers reduce the reconfiguration effort throughout the system life cycle and allow frequent reconfigurations of the manufacturing system. Despite the relevance of the subject, examples and concepts of reconfigurability enablers are fragmented in literature. Therefore, this study systematically reviews literature in order to: (i) outline the state of the art on reconfigurability enablers in automated, mixed and manual systems; and, (ii) provides classification frameworks for reconfigurability enablers for manufacturing systems, machines, robots, material handling systems, and operators. Additionally, new reconfigurability enablers related to Industry 4.0 are outlined, which connect systems and human resources with different roles and facilitate responsive adaptation of humans to changes. Directions for future research include extending the theory on reconfigurable manufacturing with fundamentals of human-centric automation and operationalising the proposed classification framework.

Many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are facing challenges in their manufacturing systems due to rapidly evolving and unpredictable customer requirements. To meet these challenges ensuring both responsiveness and cost-efficiency, SMEs may increase changeability by embedding appropriate levels of flexibility and reconfigurability in the design of manufacturing systems. In addition, the rapid diffusion of digital and smart technologies due to Industry 4.0, provides SMEs with new opportunities to increase changeability. This chapter details how flexibility and reconfigurability could be used to meet different change drivers; moreover, the related benefits are described and associated to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Finally, three industrial examples from SMEs are provided. The three cases highlight that changeability can indeed create benefits in SMEs, especially for adjusting manufacturing towards frequent variants changes, mix changes, volume changes, and new product introductions.

In the current context characterized by turbulent market conditions and the increasing relevance of sustainability requirements, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) offer great potentialities for supply chains and networks. While plenty of contributions have addressed RMSs from a technological and system-specific perspective since the mid-1990s, the research interest for the strategic potentialities of RMSs at the supply chain level is recent and mainly related to building supply chains’ resilience and sustainability. Despite the interest, methods to support supply chains to strategically exploit RMSs are still missing, while being highly needed. In this paper, a method—consisting of an index to assess machines reusability and a mixed integer programming (MIP) algorithm—is provided to support the identification of reusable and reconfigurable machine candidates at the early stage of the strategic network design. The overall method allows machines to be compared based on their reusability and geographical locations. The application of the method, as well as an example referring to the production of emergency devices during the COVID-19 pandemic are reported. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed, and, among others, strategic parameters related to machines have been identified and elaborated as enablers of supply chain reconfigurability; the proposed method supports practitioners in improving supply chain resilience and sustainability. The method also encourages practitioners towards the development and adoption of reconfigurable machines. Finally, this study also has social impacts for local communities and stimulates customer-centric collaboration among companies belonging to similar industries and sectors.

The emergence of new technologies is providing new ways to compete in the current context of changeable and unpredictable market requirements. The focus of this paper is on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), as one of the most promising transformative technological concept of such a context, thus considered by literature as the building blocks of future smart factories. However, CPSs are still in their conceptualization phase. To this end, much literature effort has been put on their technological characterization, while there is a lack of knowledge on the operations management characterization to manage such new systems. To contribute in this latter direction, this paper reviews literature in order to distinguish between technological characteristics of CPSs and operations management characteristics to build future CPS-based smart factories. This paper remarks the need for research on operations management characteristics as these may be the ones actually leading operations managers to the concrete implementation of CPS-based factories in manufacturing.

Nowadays, manufacturing firms are dealing with the unpredictability of market requirements and the frequent changes induced by technological innovation. For this reason, firms are more and more addressing the need to be responsive at an affordable cost. To do so, they are required to develop a capability called reconfigurability. This paper is a review of the existing literature because the current need makes interesting to reflect on the state of the art of reconfigurability as a concept. This reflection has led to focus on reconfigurability characteristics for both their relevance and their relationships with managerial decisions in manufacturing. To this end, a framework has been proposed. It is based on system lifecycle and production levels. These two elements have been deduced from literature and identified as relevant dimensions for decision-making.