A fuzzy logic based approach to explore manufacturing system changeability level decisions

In order to meet customer requirements, manufacturing companies need to cope with the challenge of constantly evolving product ranges. Breakthroughs in the analysis of big data will give us a better understanding of market trends and customer requirements, but there will always be some degree of uncertainty when foreseeing product evolution. Manufacturing system designers have to therefore take decisions under uncertainty, whilst considering other factors such as business, manufacturing and change strategies. In order to address this problem the factories need to be designed with a level of changeability that will allow them to be flexible or reconfigurable to produce future product platform evolutions. This paper thus contributes a novel fuzzy logic based approach to support manufacturing system designers in exploring changeability level decisions. Using this approach, this paper presents the system architecture used for an experimental implementation of an intelligent ICT tool for supporting the design of a changeable manufacturing system.