The book develops manufacturing concepts and applications beyond physical production and
towards a wider manufacturing value chain incorporating external stakeholders that include
suppliers of raw materials and parts customers collaborating manufacturing companies
manufacturing service providers and environmental organisations. The focal point of the value
chain remains as a manufacturing system and its operations whiles flows of parts materials and
information and services across the supply value chain tiers are taken into account. The book
emphasises on the two innovative paradigms of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) and
the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) along with their incorporated development. RMS as
a relatively new paradigm has been introduced to meet the requirements of 'the factories of
the future' which is aimed by Industry 4.0 though introducing greater responsiveness and
customised flexibility into production systems in which changes in product volumes and types
occur regularly. Manufacturing responsiveness can be achieved by RMS through reconfiguring the
production facilities according to changing demands of products and new market conditions.The
book addresses challenges of mass-customisation and dynamic changes in the supply-chain
environment by focusing on developing new techniques related to integrability scalability and
re-configurability at a system level and manufacturing readiness in terms of financial and
technical feasibility of RMS. It demonstrate the expected impacts of an RMS design on
operational performance and its supply value chain in the current future manufacturing
environment facing dynamic changes in the internal external circumstances. In order to
establish a circular economy through the RMS value chain an integrated data-based
reconfiguration link is introduced to incorporate information sharing amongst the value chain
stakeholders and facilitate grouping products into families with allocation of the product
families to the corresponding system configurations with optimal product-process
allocation.Decision support systems such as multi criteria decision making tools are developed
and applied for the selection of product families and optimising product-process configuration.
The proposed models are illustrated through real case studies in applicable manufacturing
firms.
