Rapid Reconfiguration of Machine-Tools for Holonic Manufacturing Systems

In the automotive industry SME suppliers are forced to keep the innovative pace with OEMs, resulting in the key requirement for economic production of small lot-sizes. State of the art technology in manufacturing systems is inadequate to meet this requirement. Current production equipment is either tailored towards a specific product or is flexible, but at the expense of expensive machinery; preventing it from extensive deployment in small and medium enterprises. The innovations proposed in this paper are based on the idea of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems, combining the required features of high throughput and high flexibility but avoiding high investment costs for expensive machinery.In this paper we propose an approach for an engineering support for reconfigurable manufacturing systems - especially for reconfigurable machine-tools based on the holonic paradigm.