Analysis of the Scalability for Different Configurations of Lines

Abstract : Scalability is one of the characteristics of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, which aim to adapt the production capacity, quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. Our goal in this chapter is to propose a global analysis of all configurations possible for a system on the point of view of scalability. For a fixed balancing of operations on the stages of the production system, we propose new metrics to evaluate the scalability of reconfigurable manufacturing systems by considering all configurations that can be obtained. These metrics rely on two main characteristics of the systems: the takt time and the number of resources of the system. We show how it is possible to adapt multi-objective metrics to this context, considering the two characteristics as multi-objective criteria. We want to evaluate the pertinence of classical balancing methods to design scalable systems.