Various products required by customers are classified into several product families, each of which is a set of similar products. A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) manages to satisfy customers, with each family corresponding to one configuration of the RMS. Then, the products belonging to the same family will be produced by the RMS under the corresponding configuration. The manufacturing system possesses the reconfigurable function for different families. In the design period of a RMS, there may exist several feasible configurations for each family. Then, an important issue in a RMS is the optimal configurations for the families. Based on a stochastic model, an optimization problem stemmed from the issue is formulated. Two algorithms are devised to solve the optimization problem. Numerical examples are presented for evaluating the efficiency of the algorithms.
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Jiancai Wang (2000) studied this question.