Modularity and integrability-based energy minimization in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment: a non-linear mixed integer formulation

Nowadays, manufacturing environment is characterized by the necessity of customized flexibility as well as the necessity of responding rapidly and cost-effectively to changing market demands while minimizing impacts on the environment and the society. To reach these goals, a key paradigm called sustainable manufacturing can be coupled with reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs). The coupling of RMS characteristics and concern for the sustainability is a basis to develop a new generation of sustainable production systems. This work outlines sustainability in a reconfigurable environment from an energy consumption point of view. A non-linear mathematical model is developed to optimize the energy consumption of an RMS through a redefinition of two of its core characteristics, i.e. modularity and integrability. The objective is to minimize the energy consumption of the system by selecting the most suitable modular machines from a set of candidate machines. The optimization problem is addressed using an exhaustive heuristic search. At the end, the applicability of the proposed approach is illustrated through a simple numerical example and the discussion of the obtained results. The study was conducted in collaboration with Aix-Marseille Université at the LIS - Laboratoire d’informatique & Systémes under the supervision of Professor Lyes Benyoucef.