Survey on Design Approaches for Robotic Manufacturing Systems in SMEs

Abstract Continuously growing pressures from competitive market require manufacturing enterprises to produce more quickly and cost-effectively. However, most of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) still adopt handwork manufacturing process due to the diversity of products and their small batch sizes. Robotic flexible manufacturing systems can be considered as an effective support to aid SMEs in solving the aforementioned conflict between the product diversity and production efficiency. Nowadays, although various design methods for robotic manufacturing systems have been made, however, there still exists challenges to implement flexible robotic manufacturing systems in small and medium-sized enterprises because of the lack concentrated market power and powerful original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in SMEs. The paper firstly analyses the challenges relating to the implementation of robotic flexible manufacturing systems in SMEs. Then, considering the proposed challenges, the authors review current design approaches for flexible manufacturing systems. Finally, the paper evaluates each design approaches according to the challenges proposed previously and points out the future research directions.