Applying Swarm intelligence to design the reconfigurable flow lines

Abstract

Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) justifies the need of hour by combining the high throughput of dedicated manufacturing system with the flexibility of flexible manufacturing systems. At the heart of RMS lies the Reconfigurable Machine Tools which are capable of performing multiple operations in its existing configurations and can further be reconfigured into more configurations which makes the configuration selection an arduous task. In the present research work the design of single part reconfigurable flow line has been attempted considering multiple objectives i.e. cost and machine utilization. A methodology is proposed for multiple objective optimization of RMS configuration based on machine utilization and cost by applying Multiple Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO). A case study has been taken to illustrate the developed approach of flow line optimization applying MOPSO. © 2013 DAAAM International Vienna All Rights Reserved.