Designs of components and manufacturing systems for agile manufacturing

A manufacturing system should be able to produce a variety of components at low cost and in a short time period. In this paper, agile manufacturing is considered in the early design of components and manufacturing systems. A design for agility rule is formulated, proved, and substantiated by numerical results. The design rule reduces manufacturing lead times in consecutive changes of product models. Along with changes of product models, machines are relocated considering the overall costs of material handling and reconfiguration. A machine relocation problem is mathematically formulated and solved with a solution procedure developed in this paper.