Abstract Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) have gained importance in the current context of increasing high variety demand, Mass Customization (MC) and market instability, due to their ability of being quickly modified to adjust their production capacity to attain sudden fluctuations in market demands as well as to accommodate operations of new products. RMS can be configured at system and machine levels. Many papers have described the RMS configuration as combinatorial optimization problems and proposed several techniques to optimize them in terms of different responses of interest. This paper presents a literature review that seeks to understand how RMS configuration has been addressed in terms of configuration level, optimization problem modelling and techniques applied to solve it. This work aims to assist researchers working on RMS configuration to identify trends and new research opportunities.