Minimizing task reassignments in the design of reconfigurable manufacturing lines with space restrictions

This paper deals with the design of a reconfigurable manufacturing line able to produce multiple products belonging to a same family. The aim is to generate for each product an appropriate line configuration subject to a given set of constraints so as to minimize the number of reassigned tasks when switching from one configuration to another. For this purpose, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed and tested on two categories of instances with 20 and 50 tasks respectively using a commercial solver. The obtained results show the efficiency (in terms of CPU and GAP) of the proposed MILP model to handle the first category of instances. However, it finds its limits to tackle the second category of instances.