Responsibility-based manufacturing

Responsibility-based manufacturing (RBM) is a novel production-system operational architecture that falls under the umbrella of the agile manufacturing paradigm. In mass-customisation environments, RBM allows most adjustments for process and product variety to take place dynamically and rapidly during production without the need for a priori system reconfiguration. Active resources (mobile robots, intelligent pallets, etc.) take the responsibility for the production of individual parts/products, thus implementing the unitary relation: individual customer --> individual producer. As different products are produced at the same time, in order to achieve a coherent and augmented team performance, coordination of active resources is obtained by exploiting the relations which hold among the activities of the individual product process plans. In particular, the paper reviews the technology involved in RBM and discusses the qualitative and quantitative performance characteristics of its coordination mechanism.