Solving production reconfiguration based on constraint satisfaction

Production reconfiguration has been well recognized as an effective means of planning production processes for product families. The major challenge of production reconfiguration lies in the handling of numerous constraints associated with product and process variety. This paper develops a constraint satisfaction approach to deal with production reconfiguration. It introduces a domain model to capture the decision variables and a systematic procedure to tackle constraint identification, representation and evaluation. An industrial example of textile spindle is used to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the domain-based constraint satisfaction problem model for production reconfiguration.