Reconfiguration of a job shop to respond to product mix changes based on a virtual production system concept

Driven by intense global competition, governments, industry and academia in recent years have invested a considerable amount of resources to make production systems more efficient. However, in most cases, once a production system type is adopted for a shop, the operation mode of the shop remains the same over time. In today's environment where changes in product mix, production batch sizes and technology are common, what is required is a procedure that allows a shop to adapt or reconfigure its mode of operation based on the production instance at hand to achieve maximum efficiency. In the present paper, the application of a virtual production system is proposed to provide such flexibility and adaptability in production. A virtual production system has the capability of switching from one operation mode to another without actual physical reconfiguration of the shop and does this to maximize its operational efficiency. Such a virtual production system is examined. Experimental results for a set of example problems show that virtual production systems are superior to traditional production systems.