# Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems from a Sustainability Perspective: A Systematic Literature Review

Martha Orellano, Rachel Campos Sabioni, Adriana Pacheco

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Martha Orellano, Rachel Campos Sabioni, Adriana Pacheco. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems from a Sustainability Perspective: A Systematic Literature Review. IFIP International Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems (APMS), Sep 2022, Gyeongju, South Korea. pp.152-159, 10.1007/978-3-031-16407-1_19. hal-05386034

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# Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems from a Sustainability Perspective: A Systematic Literature Review

Martha Orellano ID, Rachel Campos Sabioni✉ ID, and Adriana Pacheco ID

Capgemini Engineering. Direction Recherche and Innovation France, 4 avenue Didier Daurat, 31700 Blagnac, France

rachel.campos-sabioni@capgemini.com

**Abstract.** Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) are a promising manufacturing paradigm able to quickly respond to changing market needs while being economically viable. The RMS core characteristics can potentially contribute to coping with the sustainability global needs, regarding the three sustainability pillars (i.e., economic, environmental, and social). The aim of this paper is to survey the existing literature on sustainability in RMS context. Throughout a systematic literature review using the PRISMA method, 31 papers were selected for qualitative analysis. Those works were classified according to the three sustainability pillars and the RMS design and operational issues, their main contributions were analyzed, and some research gaps were identified.

**Keywords:** Sustainability · Reconfigurable manufacturing systems · Changeable manufacturing systems · Sustainable manufacturing

## 1 Introduction

Historically, manufacturing systems have been a critical driver for the growth of the global economy [1, 2]. However, given the current panorama with a growing population, an increasing demand for product differentiation, the increase of pollution, the accelerated resource depletion and the climate change, productive systems should be environmentally and socially responsible as well as economically efficient [1–3].

From the need to respond to an unpredictable and changeable market facing sustainability issues, emerged the Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS), which combines the high throughput of Dedicated Manufacturing Systems (DMS) and the flexibility of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) (Table 1). RMS is considered as one of the most suitable production systems to meet the sustainability requirements thanks to its six key characteristics (i.e., modularity, integrability, convertibility, scalability, diagnosability, customization) [1, 4]. These characteristics are directly related to the system’s ability to reconfigure, at function and/or capacity level, to meet new market requirements all over its lifecycle. Thanks to the RMS’s ability to reconfigure, these systems potentially have longer lifecycles by remaining economically viable. From a social point of view,
RMS promotes the employees' skills improvement against hyper-specialization, typical in the mass production paradigm [5]. Throughout a systematic literature review using the PRISMA method, this article investigates 31 papers addressing RMS design and operational issues from a sustainability perspective.

<table><caption>**Table 1. RMS features versus DMS and FMS ones. Adapted from Koren [6].**</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>DMS</th><th>FMS</th><th>RMS</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>System structure</td><td>Fixed</td><td>Changeable</td><td>Changeable</td></tr><tr><td>Machine structure</td><td>Fixed</td><td>Fixed</td><td>Changeable</td></tr><tr><td>System focus</td><td>Single part</td><td>Machine</td><td>Part/product family (PF)</td></tr><tr><td>Flexibility</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td><td>Customized around PF</td></tr><tr><td>Scalability</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Productivity</td><td>Very high</td><td>Low</td><td>High</td></tr><tr><td>Lifetime cost*</td><td>High</td><td>High</td><td>Medium</td></tr></tbody></table>

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 presents the methodology implemented to address the research questions. Section 3 summarizes the reviewed literature and classifies the articles according to the sustainability pillars and the addressed RMS issues. Section 4 analyses the articles' contributions according to the three sustainability pillars. Conclusions and research perspectives are presented in Sect. 5.

## 2 Research Methodology

The literature review has been performed following the main phases of the PRISMA method (i.e., identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion) as shown in Fig. 1 [7]. The research question guiding this review: *What is the state of the art regarding the three sustainability pillars in reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS)?*

Firstly, for the identification phase, a set of keywords was defined concerning the research question and the two main research fields addressed in this paper (i.e., RMS and sustainability). Advanced research was carried out with the aid of Boolean operators. The keywords included the combination of ("reconfigurable manufacturing" OR "changeable manufacturing") AND ("Sustainability" AND ("environment*" OR "social" OR "economic")). The keywords were searched by "Title" and "Field" using EBSCO and SCOPUS search engines. The timeframe considered was delimited between 1999 and 2022. This research only included English written works. A total of 85 documents were identified at this step. After a duplicate removal, 79 works were gathered, and an abstract analysis was performed resulting in 41 works selected for full-text analysis. Finally, a total of 31 papers were selected for further analysis.

<footnote>* To produce multiple parts simultaneously at variable demand.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. PRISMA framework.</figcaption></figure>

## 3 Sustainability in RMS Literature

Table 2 summarizes the original research papers selected from literature review. They were analyzed according to their associated sustainability pillar and the addressed RMS design and operational issues.

<table><caption>Table 2. Classification of works addressing sustainability in RMS.</caption><thead><tr><th>Sustainability Pillars</th><th>Process planning</th><th>Production planning/Scheduling</th><th>Layout design</th><th>System configuration design</th><th>Workforce reconfiguration</th><th>Other</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Environmental</td><td>[8–15]</td><td>[3, 12, 13, 16–19]</td><td>[13, 19–22]</td><td>[23, 24]</td><td></td><td>[25–27]</td></tr><tr><td>Social</td><td>[12, 28]</td><td>[12, 18]</td><td>[29, 30]</td><td>[24]</td><td>[31, 32]</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Economic</td><td>[8, 11–15]</td><td>[12, 13, 16–19]</td><td>[13, 16, 17, 19, 20]</td><td>[24]</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

The environmental pillar arouses a lot of interest in RMS [3, 8, 16, 20, 21]. Besides, the social aspects are weakly studied, and the contributions are mostly theoretical [5, 29–31]. Finally, while social and environmental aspects are mostly related to sustainability issues, the economic aspect has been broadly studied in RMS literature mainly as a performance criterion, without sustainability perspective. In this research only papers addressing the economic aspect with a focus on sustainability were considered.

The main RMS issues identified in the related literature and described in Table 2 are: i) Process planning, ii) production planning or scheduling, iii) layout design, iv) system configuration design (i.e., configuration at system/layout and machine levels) and v) workforce reconfiguration. While the four first topics are often addressed as main issues in RMS, in this review the workforce configuration arises as relatively new RMS topic, evidencing the relevance of investigating the human within the RMS.
The articles related exclusively to the social pillar were classified into a new category, «workforce re-configuration» which considers the human as an RMS resource that needs to be optimised [32].

Recent literature reviews were also analyzed to position the contribution of this work [4, 33]. Battaïa et al. [4] introduce the three sustainability pillars but focus on the energy efficient RMS, while Dahmani et al. [33] address the economic and environmental pillars, without considering the social one.

# 4 The Pillars of Sustainability in RMS

## 4.1 Environmental Pillar

Environmental issues in RMS appear as the main sustainability pillar since they were addressed by more than 80% of the papers in Table 2. Most of them present approaches to minimise environmental impacts on the RMS while optimising the process planning [8–15], production planning/scheduling [3, 12, 13, 16–19], layout design [13, 19–22], or system configuration design [23, 24].

According to the international standards ISO 14001:2015 [34] and ISO 26000:2010 [35] the environmental pillar includes four main impact categories: i) Resource utilisation, ii) Pollution, iii) Climate change, and iv) Environment preservation.

In the reviewed literature, only the resource utilisation is broadly discussed, since most of the papers minimize energy consumption [4, 16, 18, 23]. This leads to the emergency of REMS (Reconfigurable energy-efficient manufacturing systems) [23]. REMS are a category of RMS whose components can switch to an energy-efficient mode when they are inactive in each configuration, and turn back into a working mode when needed [4, 23]. It is noted that the high academic interest on the optimisation of energy consumption in RMS is directly linked to the reduction of production costs and not to a real environmental consciousness [16, 19]. Few papers consider the pollution and climate change, focusing respectively on the hazardous waste generated from the production process, and the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) linked to the energy consumption [8, 9, 21]. Most of these studies are still numerical and inputs are estimated. Therefore, further research is needed to investigate how environmental-related data could be collected from real applications to calculate sustainability KPIs.

Although some authors highlight the importance of the lifecycle perspective in RMS environmental pillar there is a lack of studies in this subject [4]. For instance, Brunoe et al. [25] analyse the RMS convertibility potential to enable circularity strategies, comparing three scenarios to manage the end of life (EOL) of products. However, their proposal is limited to the product, and does not address RMS EOL issues. Besides, Bi et al. appear as the only addressing RMS EOL through 4R strategies (reusing, recycling, redesigning and recovery) to reconfigure obsolete machines for new functionalities. According to Battaïa et al. [4], RMS systems potentially have longer lifecycles than traditional ones, thanks to their ability to be reconfigured. The above highlights the interest of developing further research concerning the lifecycle analysis of RMS.
## 4.2 Social Pillar

The social pillar appeared as the least investigated in this RMS literature review, and most of the works remain theoretical. Except by Yazdani et al. [12], which maximized the number of employees per machine in order to increase the employability in the industry location. The few studies dedicated exclusively to the social pillar focus on ergonomics [5, 29, 30], and more recent research addresses organisational aspects of the workforce [31, 32].

The ergonomics studies are based on the work of Cheikh et al. [30], which proposes a set of indicators such as movement repeatability, musculoskeletal trouble, and bad working conditions (e.g., noise). The authors highlight the pertinence of measuring ergonomics because RMS can lead to a higher level of repetitive tasks than traditional manufacturing systems (e.g., frequent assembly and disassembly movements to reconfigure the system).

Hashemi-Petroodi et al. [32] carried out a literature review on the workforce configuration, demonstrating the lack of studies on this subject. The authors claim that a joint reconfiguration of workers and machines can increase the RMS adaptability and robustness. Nevertheless, there is still no work simultaneously investigating machines and human reconfiguration abilities in RMS. Besides, the skills and cognitive development of employees are weakly discussed in the RMS literature. Only Korder et al. [31] propose a theoretical framework that describes different skill levels of employees in an RMS context. Nevertheless, this contribution remains theoretical and practical approaches are still lacking.

Three main conclusions can be drawn out from the social issues in RMS literature. Firstly, the ergonomics is the most developed social aspect, supported by existing ergonomics metrics broader applied in manufacturing, which means that those metrics are not specific to RMS context but used in a generic way. Secondly, there is a research opportunity regarding the impact of the Industry 4.0 technologies on the workforce organisation (e.g., human-machine collaboration or cobotics, sensors, actuators, etc.). Finally, more research can be done regarding employees' skills in RMS context. Concerning this latter, we propose considering an employee as a set of competences and skills able to evolve in the RMS environment.

## 4.3 Economic Pillar

Beyond the typical costs considered in any manufacturing system (e.g., cost of raw material, labour, and processing, etc.), most of research include RMS specific metrics as the cost of changing the system configuration, including machines and/or tools changes. Two types of costs related to sustainability issues have been identified in this literature review. The first one is the energy consumption cost and more recently, works have been addressing the GHG emissions and hazardous waste disposal cost.

Singh et al. [16] propose an optimisation method using cost metrics related to the system investment, maintenance, and energy consumption. Concerning the energy consumption cost, the authors consider an average energy price, without modelling the energy fluctuation prices or time-of-use (TOU). Nevertheless, energy prices can vary along the day (e.g., on-peak, mid-peak, and off-peak hours), and depending on the day
(i.e., labour day, weekend) or year season [4, 19]. In this line, Ghanei and Algeddawy [17, 19] propose a mathematical model to maximize RMS sustainability considering the energy TOU, namely the calculation of the energy consumption cost for each task, at the exact time of the day in which the task is performed.

Khettabi et al. [36] and Khezri et al. [9] propose multi-objective optimisation methods for process plan generation, in which one of the objective functions corresponds to the total production cost. They focus on two environmental metrics for the cost calculation: disposal cost for hazardous liquid waste, and disposal cost for GHG emissions, without considering the energy consumption.

Most of the reviewed papers address the economic pillar of sustainability from a cost-driven perspective. An important economic criterion that was not considered by any of the works is the return on investment (ROI). As stated by Andersen et al. [37], justifying investments in RMS and its reconfiguration potential in the first steps of its implementation is essential; therefore, future works optimizing the RMS design could consider the ROI.

# 5 Conclusion and Research Perspectives

In this article, we perform a systematic literature review of 31 works to explore the research advances and opportunities regarding sustainability in the RMS context. The reviewed literature is classified and analysed throughout the lens of the three pillars of sustainability and the main topics of RMS.

The literature reveals an increasing interest in incorporating sustainability issues in the RMS design, since most of the reviewed papers were published in the last four years. However, most of them remain theoretical and practical applications are still missing. Further, there is still a lack of research simultaneously addressing the three sustainability pillars. The environmental pillar is the most addressed with a focus on energy consumption minimization. The economic pillar often includes environmental related costs, besides typical operational ones. The social pillar appears as the least addressed in literature and most of the related papers focus on ergonomic aspects.

For future research, we suggest the development of more application-oriented approaches to holistically evaluate the sustainability of RMS, in order to help industries trials to go towards more sustainable reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Regarding environmental issues, we suggest future research to investigate how circular strategies can be applied during the RMS design and reconfiguration. Considering social pillar, further research can be done on the employee skills and their cognitive development required to adapt in new RMS configuration contexts. Seeing the operator as an evolutive resource can highly impact the resource assignment decisions as well as the reconfiguration and operational management, since qualified operators become capable of manage and anticipate the difficulties encountered in the production systems.

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