Metasystem Switches in a Reconfigurable Production System

The transition to reconfigurable manufacturing systems is not only a matter of modernization and development of production, but also it’s survival in modern conditions, where market changes dictate the situation. Since the beginning of research on this topic, a huge number of articles have been written by a large number of authors around the world, who, despite all this diversity, still do not specify the practical image of the reconfigurable system and it’s element—the reconfigurable machine tool, and the main problem remains the main reason for the beginning of the development of reconfigurable systems—acceleration their settings (reconfigurations) when changing external conditions, which largely depends on the units of equipment. This article summarizes and concretizes the subject area of the reconfigurable machine tool with the help of structural and functional modeling of IDEF0 and an ontological approach. A review of articles on reconfigurable machine tools was made to highlight practical features and requirements, the key materials for this article are given in the introductory part. The analysis of the developed ontology with aspects of the design of the reconfigurable machine tool made it possible to generalize the factors affecting the speed of equipment restructuring and highlight the solution consisting in the proposal of a reconfiguration plan. The construction of this plan aims to reduce the reconfiguration time by choosing a sequence of configurations that contains fewer elements involved and moves during the transition from one configuration to another. A metasystem approach has been proposed and described to form this sequence.