An exact approach to improve the reusability of serial machining lines

Since the production requirements may change during the line life cycle, the decision makers have to be ready to adapt an existing line to new conditions. The approach presented in this paper seeks for a new line configuration meeting new production requirements that reuses as much as possible the components of the initial line. The search of this configuration has to take into account several restrictions such as different technological constraints and compatibility between operations and equipment. To solve optimally this problem, a new mixed integer programming model is developed. This approach is illustrated by a case study. Then, the computational experiments are reported on a collection of benchmark data. They show the effectiveness of the approach developed.