Measuring the effort of a reconfiguration process

In recent years, the fields of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, holonic manufacturing systems, multi-agent systems have made technological advances to support the ready reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. To help assess these advancements, a reconfigurability measurement process has been developed based upon the complementary ideas of reconfiguration potential and ease. This work measured the reconfigurability of an automated manufacturing system as an intrinsic property of the systempsilas structure. However, it did not explicitly measure the effort required to realize a reconfiguration process. This paper recombines the concepts of reconfiguration potential and reconfiguration ease to measure the effort required to realize a specific class of reconfiguration processes. The theoretical developments are then demonstrated in an illustrative example. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential implications on adjacent research.