Development of a Standard Reconfigurable Assembly Cell for Agile Manufacturing.

To date, automation has been most successfully used in mass production applications. In such environments, custom automation systems are designed to meet the specific process and production volume requirements of a given product or a predefined family of products. These conventional automated manufacturing systems development efforts generally lead to the most efficient production system and represent an ideal strategy for high volume production where the cost of the dedicated system can be recouped over the market life of the supported product set. However, custom automation systems are similar to jigsaw puzzles in that their component technologies can only fit together in a specific manner and cannot be easily reused for additional applications. The high degree of system customization which make these systems so highly efficient and cost effective for a target product frequently precludes its cost-effective redeployment for any other product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]