A review on artificial intelligence applications to the optimal design of dedicated and reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are considered the future of manufacturing, being able to overcome both dedicated (DMS) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). In fact, they provide significant cost and time reductions in the launch of new products, and in the integration of new manufacturing processes into existing systems. The goals of RMS design are the extension of the production variety, the adaption to rapid changes in the market demand, and the minimization of the investment costs. Despite the interest of many authors, the debate on RMS is still open due to the lack of practical applications. This work is a review of the state-of-the-art on the design of cellular RMS, compared to DMS, by means of optimization. The problem addressed belongs to the NP-Hard family of combinatorial problem. The focus is on non-exact meta-heuristic and artificial intelligence methods, since these have been proven to be effective and robust in solving complex manufacturing design problems. A wide investigation on the most recurrent techniques in DMS and RMS literature is performed at first. A critical analysis over these techniques is given in the end.