Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-019-01471-2 A modular factory testbed for the rapid reconfguration of manufacturing systems D.‑Y. Kim 1  · J.‑W. Park 1  · S. Baek 1  · K.‑B. Park 1  · H.‑R. Kim 1  · J.‑I. Park 1  · H.‑S. Kim 1  · B.‑B. Kim 1  · H.‑Y. Oh 1  · K. Namgung 1  · W. Baek 1 Received: 16 September 2018 / Accepted: 14 March 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The recent manufacturing trend toward mass customization and further personalization of products requires factories to be smarter than ever before in order to: (1) quickly respond to customer requirements, (2) resiliently retool machinery and adjust operational parameters for unforeseen system failures and product quality problems, and (3) retroft old systems with upcom- ing new technologies. Furthermore, product lifecycles are becoming shorter due to unbounded and unpredictable customer requirements, thereby requiring reconfgurable and versatile manufacturing systems that underpin the basic building blocks of smart factories. This study introduces a modular factory testbed, emphasizing transformability and modularity under a distributed shop-foor control architecture. The main technologies and methods, being developed and verifed through the testbed, are presented from the four aspects of rapid factory transformation: self-layout recognition, rapid workstation and robot reprogramming, inter-layer information sharing, and confgurable software for shop-foor monitoring. Keywords Reconfgurable · Testbed · Smart factory · Distributed control Introduction The manufacturing paradigm has shifted from mass pro- duction to batch production (or mass customization), and recently to “batch size one production,” in accordance with changes in market conditions over time, such as supply- demand reversal, diverse customer requirements, and short- ening product lifecycles (Mehrabi et al. 2002; Koren and Shpitalni 2010; Dufe et al. 2017; Huang et al. 2018). From the perspective of manufacturing cost, however, it is com- mon that continuous production of large amounts of stand- ardized products in a dedicated manufacturing facility is advantageous over small batch production for which a group of multi-purpose workstations and fexible material handlers keep changing their operational parameters to produce dif- fering batches of various products (see Fig. 1). Therefore, it can be said that new manufacturing systems are functionally * D.-Y. Kim dykim@unist.ac.kr J.-W. Park parkjw@unist.ac.kr S. Baek sbaek@unist.ac.kr K.-B. Park kbpark@unist.ac.kr H.-R. Kim hyerim@unist.ac.kr J.-I. Park jipark90@unist.ac.kr H.-S. Kim hskim@unist.ac.kr B.-B. Kim bkim@unist.ac.kr H.-Y. Oh hayoungoh@unist.ac.kr K. Namgung kichang@unist.ac.kr W. Baek wsbaek@unist.ac.kr 1 School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, UNIST-gil 50, Ulsan 44919, South Korea