Facing the flexible production path caused by multifunction equipment, in order to solve the problem of virtual cell reconfiguration under new task insertion, this paper proposed a new method termed resource elements to define equipment capabilities. First, use resource elements to describe equipment capacity and parts demand. Scecondly, calculate the fitness of new parts by similarity calculation formula, and determine if the virtual cells needs to be reconfigured, a mathematical model for virtual cell reconfiguration with the least production cost, equipment load deviation and cell adjustment amplitude has been built, and the NSGA-III algorithm is introduced to solve the multi-objective function, a series of nondominated solutions are obtained. Finally, the example demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the virtual cell reconfiguration method based on resource elements under new task insertion.