Scalability analysis in industry 4.0 manufacturing

In the recent years, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) emerged as a new class of manufacturing systems aiming to adapt the production capacity in a quick, efficient and cost-effective way, through a set of six core features, i.e. modularity, integrability, scalability, convertibility, customisation and diagnosibility. This paper focuses on the scalability attribute, i.e. the ability of the manufacturing system to rapidly adapt to fluctuations of the market demand, providing metrics to evaluate the scalability of machines, in both discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing industries, which produce different types of goods. The proposed metrics are applied to an industrial case study from the discrete and the process manufacturing industries to highlight the different trend of the scalability attribute.