Evaluation of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems configurations using tolerance criteria

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems have the ability to evolve in response to a change in their environment or a modification of their composition (after a failure of one of its components for instance). This paper propose to use the concept of architecture and configuration to describe both the invariant part of the system as well as the changeable one. The criticality analysis is computed on a configuration. Results can then be used to choose between configurations, enhance one or analyze reconfiguration capability of the configuration. Tools for applying this metric on the model are presented. Results are given for a sample RMS configuration.