Increasing competitiveness experienced by manufacturing firms is calling for cost optimization, following global manufacturing practices and responding rapidly to the changes in demands, volumes and technology. This poses serious challenges to profitability and hence sustainability of the business. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems have the potential to address these issues in a cost effective and sustainable manner because of the changeability as compared to dedicated or flexible manufacturing systems. This article provides a review of selected literature on reconfigurable manufacturing systems and allied technologies. It discusses the issues associated with RMS such as, reconfiguration principles, changeability, reconfigurable process plans, reconfigurable machine tools – structure and control, process planning for reconfigurable machines and product families in RMS. A short comparison between, the dedicated and flexible manufacturing systems and RMS is made. To conclude, some generic research areas for manufacturing, machine tool design, control engineering as well as computer engineering have been identified.