ESTIMATION OF OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY OF RECONFIGURABLE WORKING STATION
At the end of the 20 <sup>th</sup> century - at the beginning of the 21 <sup>st</sup> century the development of machine tool systems is determined by the following condition - machine building has entered a new era - the era of world competition conditioned by significantly increased purchasing ability of a buyer. In this connection, the manufacturers, trying to increase their profit and attract more customers, regularly modernize products to comply with scientific-technological progress and consumer requirements. Steady increase of tendency to change of manufactured products is one of the hardest-to-carry out by modern production systems conditions. The most widespread existing manufacturing systems, such as automatic lines (AL) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) have a number of features not allowing them to comply with the up-to-date requirements. Automatic lines have high operational efficiency (mass production), and when switching to manufacture of a new range of products they require heavy capital outlays and involve long downtimes. Flexible manufacturing systems have lower efficiency (series production) compared to ALs, but they are rather flexible when switching to manufacture of new products. At the same time, the high level of flexibility is frequently excessive and determines the high cost of FMS. In this connection, today great attention is paid in machine building to construction of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) - the systems able to manufacture products with operational efficiency of mass production and flexibility of FMS. One of the most important and little-investigated areas of construction of reconfigurable manufacturing systems in Russia and abroad is the issues of assurance and evaluation of RMS operational efficiency indices.