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 responding rapidly and cost-effectively to changing market demands while minimizing impacts on environment and 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 sustainability concerns is a basis to develop a new generation of sustainable production systems. This paper outlines sustainability in a reconfigurable environment from an energy consumption point of view. A nonlinear mathematical model is developed to optimize the energy consumption of a RMS through a redefinition of its core characteristics-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 search heuristic. Finally, the applicability of the proposed approach is illustrated through a simple numerical example and the discussion of the obtained results.