Guidelines for evaluating the ease of reconfiguration of manufacturing systems

This paper presents guidelines for evaluating the ease of reconfiguration of manufacturing systems. Based reconfigurability measurement tools proposed in the past and a reconfiguration process model, the paper proposes a method that can be used to assess different system characteristics. After the guideline is presented, an example of how the method can be applied to a batch processing system is given. It is found that the proposed method can be applied to batch processing systems based on ISA S88 batch server commercial software.