Optimal configuration changes for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) are designed to quickly adapt to new products and production requirements. To this end, RMSs need to be able to perform fast changes between different configurations. This paper investigates the reconfiguration of RMSs in a supervisory control framework. Different from previous work, we formulate and solve a reconfiguration problem that allows to start a newly requested configuration before the previously active configuration has been completed. Our solution is optimal in the sense that there is no other solution that enables an earlier start of the new configuration. The practicability of the proposed solution is demonstrated by a small RMS example.