Reconfiguration Methods for Exception Handling in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) offer capabilities for quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality in response to sudden changes in market conditions. Both at the system and at the cell level exception events occur dynamically and unpredictably during the production process. These exceptions interrupt the production process by causing errors in the schedule plan. Error/ exception handling is the policy how to deal with errors caused by the occurrence of out-of-ordinary events. Author explores the new strategies to handling error events and proposes an intelligent control structure for real-time error handling, and illustrates the reconfiguration ability is the new crucial technological factor enabling new strategies to handle out-of-ordinary events of the production process.