Core Characteristics of Reconfigurability and their Influencing Elements

The unpredictability of market requirements is more and more pushing manufacturing firms to be responsive. To this end, reconfigurability is needed. Reconfigurability is composed of six core characteristics: modularity, integrability, diagnosability, scalability, convertibility and customization. These characteristics are related with each other. This paper - exploiting the available literature - aims at identifying and analyzing elements influencing the core characteristics. As a result, characteristics, influencing elements and relationships have been located in a comprehensive framework. The novelty of this research is that the relationships between characteristics have been taken into account. For this reason, this research is considered a first step to understand how manufacturing firms can achieve reconfigurability, by fully exploiting the core characteristics