Reconfigurable manufacturing system

A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a system invented in 1998 that is designed for the outset of rapid change in its structure, as well as its hardware and software components, in order to quickly adjust its production capacity and functionality within a part family in response to sudden market changes or intrinsic system change.

[7] From 1996 to 2007, Yoram Koren received an NSF grant of $32.5 million to develop the RMS science base and its software and hardware tools.

In practice, there are small variations in the precision of identical machines, which create accumulated errors in the manufactured product; each path has its own "stream-of-variations" (a term coined by Y.

[9][10] Ideal reconfigurable manufacturing systems, according to professor Yoram Koren in 1995, possess six characteristics: modularity, integrability, customized flexibility, scalability, convertibility, and diagnosability.

[15] A collection of mathematical tools, which are defined as the RMS science base, may be used to maximize system productivity with the smallest possible number of machines.

A schematic diagram of Koren's RMS, drawn by Rod Hill
Reconfigurable Manufacturing System Architecture by Y. Koren
RMT patent drawing : US 5943750 . A patent of a reconfigurable machine tool with a modular structure, containing spindle modules that can be reconfigured to allow different machining operations.