In such a system, equipment can be moved to build cells for specific jobs, or arranged in, and operated as, a job shop. For each job we decide whether to do it in the job shop, or to build a job-specific cell. If we build a cell, we must decide which machines should be assigned to the cell. We must also produce a schedule for the system as a whole. The dynamic layout decisions, indicating where to perform the jobs and the allocation of resources, plus the correpsonding schedule, are obtained by Lagrangean Relaxation that seems to achieve a good lower bound, followed by a list scheduling algorithm that builds a feasible schedule.
Preliminary results attained are encouraging when compared with the traditional layouts.
To illustrate and motivate the concept, example implementations of RMC in the textile industry will be presented.