Performance evaluation for a footwear manufacturing system with multiple production lines and different station failure rates

This paper develops a three-phase procedure to measure the performance of a highly value-added footwear manufacturing system taking reworking actions into account, in which the system consists of multiple production lines. We mainly address the system reliability as a performance indicator to evaluate the possibility of demand satisfaction. First, we construct the manufacturing system as a manufacturing network by graphical transformation and decomposition. Second, capability analysis is implemented to determine the input flow of each station based on the manufacturing network. Third, a simple algorithm is proposed to generate all minimal capacity vectors that stations should provide to satisfy the given demand. We evaluate the system reliability in terms of the minimal capacity vectors. A further decision making issue is discussed to decide a reliable production strategy. Whenever the system state changes, the proposed performance evaluation procedure can be implemented easily and flexibly.     

System reliability of a manufacturing network with reworking action and different failure rates

From the perspective of network analysis, the manufacturing system can be constructed as a stochastic-flow network, since the capacity of each machine is stochastic (i.e. multistate) owing to the failure, partial failure, and maintenance. Considering reworking action and different failure rates of machines, the input flow (raw materials/work in process) processed by each machine might be defective, and therefore the output flow (work in process/products) would be less than the input amount. To evaluate the capability of the manufacturing system, we measure the probability that the manufacturing network can satisfy demand. Such a probability is defined as the system reliability. A decomposition method is first proposed to divide the manufacturing network into one general processing path and one reworking path. Subsequently, two algorithms are utilised for different network models to generate the lower boundary vector of machine capacity to guarantee that the manufacturing network is able to produce sufficient products fulfilling the demand. The system reliability of the manufacturing network can be derived in terms of such a capacity vector afterwards.     

Product recovery optimization in closed-loop supply chain to improve sustainability in manufacturing

When business practices shift from a traditional open supply chain to a closed loop instead, the environmental and societal issues are efficiently integrated in business development. However, even an efficiently integrated shift introduces a number of trade-offs due to the contradictory goals that emerge from that business’s economical, environmental and social dimensions. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective mixed integer mathematical problem for a generic closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) network to rationalise how a system’s product recovery helps to improve manufacturing sustainability. The CLSC network proposed in this study consists of a hybrid manufacturing facility, warehouse, distribution centres, collection centres and a hybrid recovery facility (HRF). The proposed model determines the best location for the HRF and optimal flow of products, recovered parts and material in the network while it simultaneously maximises profit, saves activity costs, helps to decrease the harmful effects of the manufacturing process and makes a positive impact on societal development. To validate the model, a numerical illustration with the help of a case study from an electrical manufacturing industry is offered. The results authenticate the approach of the model towards the fulfilment of various environmental regulations. A sensitivity analysis, completed on demand, and the return rate also assists decision-makers to manage their decisions with a broader insight towards manufacturing sustainability.     

SWMRD: a Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery system for cross-enterprise collaboration

As supply chains are becoming ever more global and agile in the modern manufacturing era, enterprises are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective discovery of shared manufacturing resources provided by their partners, wherever they are. Enterprises are thus faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in manufacturing interoperability and integration over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents a prototype intelligent system SWMRD (Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery) for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. Ontology-based annotation to the distributed manufacturing resources via a new, multidisciplinary manufacturing ontology is proposed on the semantic web to convert resources into machine understandable knowledge, which is a prelude to the meaningful resource discovery for cross-enterprise multidisciplinary collaboration. An ontology-based multi-level knowledge retrieval model is devised to extend the traditional information retrieval approaches based on keyword search, with integrated capabilities of graph search, semantic search, fuzzy search and automated reasoning to realise the intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources, e.g. to facilitate more flexible, meaningful, accurate and automated resource discovery. A case study for intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources is used to demonstrate the practicality of the developed system.     

System Performance of Wireless Sensor Network Using LoRa–Zigbee Hybrid Communication

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is considered as the fastest growing technology pattern in recent years because of its applicability in varied domains. Many sensor nodes with different sensing functionalities are deployed in the monitoring area to collect suitable data and transmit it to the gateway. Ensuring communications in heterogeneous WSNs, is a critical issue that needs to be studied. In this research paper, we study the system performance of a heterogeneous WSN using LoRa–Zigbee hybrid communication. Specifically, two Zigbee sensor clusters and two LoRa sensor clusters are used and combined with two Zigbee-to-LoRa converters to communicate in a network managed by a LoRa gateway. The overall system integrates many different sensors in terms of types, communication protocols, and accuracy, which can be used in many applications in realistic environments such as on land, under water, or in the air. In addition to this, a synchronous management software on ThingSpeak Web server and Blynk app is designed. In the proposed system, the token ring protocol in Zigbee network and polling mechanism in LoRa network is used. The system can operate with a packet loss rate of less than 0.5% when the communication range of the Zigbee network is 630 m, and the communication range of the LoRa network is 3.7 km. On the basis of the digital results collected on the management software, this study proves tremendous improvements in the system performance.     

Assessing the effects of manufacturing infrastructure preparation prior to enterprise information-systems implementation

Reports on the success or failure of enterprise information system (EIS) implementation have been decidedly mixed. In this study, we focus on manufacturing infrastructure preparation prior to EIS implementation and report the results of a survey of 152 US manufacturing companies that have implemented EIS. We have provided four major findings in this study: (1) the requirements from customers and trading partners are more powerful drivers motivating US manufacturing firms to implementing enterprise systems than internal business planning needs; (2) one manufacturing infrastructural issue often has implications for other infrastructural items in implementing technology, so various manufacturing infrastructural issues should be prepared simultaneously; (3) manufacturing infrastructure preparation prior to EIS implementation has significant positive effects on customer-focused performance, production/operations performance, and financial performance; and (4) better customer-focused performance contributes to better financial performance.     

Concurrent process planning and scheduling in distributed virtual manufacturing

With the fast development of the world economy, distributed virtual manufacturing is becoming increasingly important since it can respond rapidly to market changes and make resource sharing more efficient among manufacturing partners. In this environment, partners may be located at different geographical locations, and co-operation among partners is a vital task and thus concurrent planning and scheduling has become a challenging research topic. This paper presents a computerized model that can integrate these manufacturing functions and resolve some of the critical problems in distributed virtual manufacturing, such as virtual cooperation, optimal partner selection, etc. This integration model is realized through a multi-agent approach that provides a practical approach for software integration in a distributed environment. A cost function is proposed and adopted for optimal partner selection in a virtual enterprise, which not only considers a partner's manufacturing capability and process requirements, but also the processing time, partner's location and product due date. Through establishing a virtual manufacturing model in a simulated environment, the proposal was validated with a case study. It shows that the proposed methodology can satisfy the distribution and agility requirements. This approach is able to contribute to the reduction of product cost, improving product quality and shortening lead time, compared to the sequential approach in the normal engineering and production practice.     

Development of an E-maintenance System for a CNC System

Globalization and rapid growth of network technologies have changed the traditional patterns of device maintenance. E-maintenance has emerged and is widely used in many manufacturing systems. In this paper, a new architecture of an E-maintenance system is proposed, which consists of E-maintenance centre, embedded CNC gateway and CNG terminal. The E-maintenance centre provides the technical support and service for customers based on Internet and communication technologies. The embedded CNC gateway serves as an agent between the public and plant device network, and provides web-based access for the CNC system. A reconfigurable CNC terminal is highly desired in a signal measuring and analysing system, which is built on the top of component and software bus based models. Finally, the E-maintenance system for the CNC machine is implemented and the experiments show that the architecture of an E-maintenance system can effectively reduce the downtime of devices, the responding time of maintenance work, and increase both the quality and the productivity of enterprises.     

Manufacturing perspective of enterprise application integration: the state of the art review

Manufacturing enterprise today has become a matter of effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge-based engineering. Several new manufacturing paradigms such as virtual enterprise (or extended enterprise) and mass customization have resulted in a highly distributed and autonomous manufacturing system. On the one hand, this will increase the competitiveness of a firm in terms of quickly meeting dynamic changes in the market; on the other hand, this will also increase the difficulty of integrating different information and knowledge systems residing in each member firm. This integration is also called enterprise application integration (EAI) (here the term application means information systems or software systems for supporting manufacturing or service activities). The methodology for EAI has been studied for at least a decade; but no satisfactory solution has been found from a practical viewpoint. EAI is becoming even more difficult due to the boom in various enterprise information and knowledge systems (and also to ever increasing competition in the technical software market). The study presented in this paper conducted a critical analysis of existing solutions to EAI. We consider EAI as having two generic issues: semantic integration and syntactic integration. The main problem of semantic integration reduces to the general problem of enterprise or business modelling. The main problem of syntactic integration reduces to the general problem of software architecture of enterprise applications which enables interoperability between any two EAs. While the first issue is studied in the manufacturing field, the second issue is studied in the computing engineering field. In this paper, both issues are put together under the context of EAI and studied. The result of the study, together with our experience with one Canadian manufacturing firm, has led to the identification of several issues to be addressed in the future. We also outline possible ways to approach these issues.     

Trust-embedded coordination in supply chain information sharing

This paper studies supply chain coordination with trust-embedded cost-sharing contract. In a two-tier supply chain, a retailer (she) and a supplier (he) make their private demand forecasting individually. The retailer places soft-orders, which are costless, non-verifiable and cancellable before shipping, to the supplier. After that, the supplier relies on the retailer’s ordering information to update his demand evaluation and prepare his capacity. How much the supplier relies on the retailer’s ordering information is specified by trust, which is a kind of psychological feeling and affected by multiple factors. When the supplier does not fully trust the retailer, he tends to prepare a conservative capacity to avoid over-production. To coordinate the supply chain, a two-stage coordination process is proposed. At the first stage, the supplier and retailer negotiate a cost-sharing rule to bind soft-orders. At the second stage, the retailer places a soft-order and decides whether or not to bind it referring to the cost-sharing rule. After that, the supplier determines his optimal production capacity. We show that the retailer and supplier value trust differently in the experimental studies. We also find that there is a threshold of negotiation power for the supply chain partners which means the supplier’s/retailer’s expected profit drops down if his/her negotiation power exceeds certain thresholds. The experimental studies also show that the proposed the two-stage coordination is effective.     

Workware decision support systems: A comprehensive methodological approach to work-scheduling problems

Around-the-clock continuous operations are expanding as global business activity, government de-regulation, flexible manufacturing and lean operation become more common. These developments often require night work, long work hours and/or irregular work schedules. As a result of these requirements, decisions about work schedule assignments are frequently made with little knowledge, information and/or warning. Some of the resulting work-scheduling practices undoubtedly increase operation and worker exposure to health and safety risks. To counter these work-scheduling problems, a comprehensive work schedules knowledge information system is outlined. Within this model, a Workware Warehouse is proposed as an Internet gateway where decision support systems are readily and freely available. This model suggests a new paradigm for work-scheduling ergonomics, one where designing, filling and maintaining a Workware Warehouse is the primary focus of the human factors professional.     

服务型制造理论研究综述

分析了服务和制造的融合导致产品内涵和制造组织发生改变,归纳总结了服务型制造的形态,讨论了服务型制造的价值来源,提出了服务型制造是一种可持续的商业模式,其可持续性表现在企业效益、顾客价值、生态效益等三个方面.本文认为,相比于传统制造模式,制造和服务过程中的顾客参与和体验以及网络化协作提供产品服务系统是服务型制造的主要特征,并在此基础上论述了服务型制造的理论基础是传统制造理论、行为科学、组织理论、社会网络理论和复杂系统理论,构思了服务型制造理论体系,并提出现阶段应研究的若干关键问题.     

敏捷化模具制造合作网络模型构想及其运行机制设计

从市场需求变化出发,分析了模具制造模式变革的必然性,提出了旨在快速响应市场机遇的敏捷化模具制造合作网络模型,并选择通过"市场组织化"规制来确保合作网络的有效运行.最后,通过深圳模具网络化制造系统应用实例,展示了敏捷化模具制造合作网络的发展雏形.     

System for enhancing supply chain agility through exception handling

With the emergence of a new business era characterized by continuous and unpredictable changes and tough global competition, an agile supply chain has been recognized as a competitive strategy for companies to survive and prosper. Co-OPERATE, an on-going IST project, is aimed at developing concepts and tools for coordination of production planning and control activities in the complex and distributed supply network, and is targeted in the automotive supply and the semiconductor industries. Since the work reported here is based on the project, a framework for manufacturing coordination in the distributed supply network is proposed for the project. As an important part of the project, exception handling is further described. First, through boundary investigation, the scope of this business solution is clarified. Second, a methodology is developed to help understand the mechanism behind the exception handling process. Third, guiding design principles are described to direct the detailed business process design. Finally, rush-order handling is chosen as part of the concept prototype for implementation and evaluation. Extensive feedback from industrial business partners has been collected and taken into account for further implementation.     

Product customisation: an empirical study of competitive advantage and repeat business

Empirical evidence is presented from 24 UK based manufacturing companies, all offering a degree of product customisation, with most having a significant pure customisation engineer-to-order (ETO) element. The evidence addresses the issue of competitive advantage, which has lacked empirical evidence in previous manufacturing strategy literature, and includes a detailed investigation of the strategic importance of repeat business. It contrasts its results with those previously found in the literature and concludes that there are significant differences in the competitive priorities theoretically associated with this sector. In particular, it is argued that cumulative capabilities are needed, with a low cost competence often included. Four different types of repeat business are identified, one relating to repeat business customisers and three relating to versatile manufacturing companies, and the strategic importance of repeat business is discussed. It is indicated that for some ETO companies, repeat business is perceived to be an important method to reduce costs and achieve business stability. However, a number of the other companies studied saw repeat business as infeasible and hence need to find other ways to reduce costs and improve company performance measures. Future research to extend this work into a longitudinal study or a broader survey is proposed.     

Design of smart connected manufacturing resources to enable changeability,reconfigurability and total-cost-of-ownership models in the factory-of-the-future

The fourth industrial revolution requires higher capabilities of changeability and reconfigurability (C–R) of the future factories (FoF), as well as a higher focus on business models that are based on total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) paradigm. Up to date, there are little scientific contributions to deploy C–R into TCO models, as well as to systematic plan and design manufacturing resources such as to facilitate FoF ecosystem. In order to address this issue, this paper introduces research results that show how to deploy C–R, connectivity, smartness and TCO requirements into the technical solutions of manufacturing resources of FoF. Contributions emerging from this research include an index to measure C–R capability of manufacturing resources, a model to assess economic feasibility of a FoF over its lifecycle, as well as a methodology and related tools to design smart connected manufacturing resources with embedded features to facilitate changeability and reconfigurability in a FoF. Theoretical contributions are explained through a case study of a fast reconfigurable robotic manufacturing cell. Preliminary results demonstrate that it is possible to rapid design smart connected manufacturing resources and integrate them into FoF architectures that support convertibility, integrability, modifiability, adaptability, serviceability, scalability, integration of resources from various producers, service clustering and cloud-based services.     

Reliability assessment for a stochastic manufacturing system with reworking actions

This article evaluates the system reliability of a manufacturing system with reworking actions, where the system reliability is an essential indicator to determine whether the manufacturing system is capable or not. Based on the path concept, we transformed the manufacturing system into a stochastic-flow network in which the capacity of each machine is stochastic (i.e., multistate) due to failure, partial failure, and maintenance. In such a manufacturing network, the input flow (raw materials/WIP; work-in-process) processed by each machine might be defective and thus the output flow (WIP/products) would be less than the input amount. To analyze the different sources processed by the manufacturing network, we decomposed the network into one general processing path and several reworking paths by a graphical technique. Subsequently, an algorithm for the manufacturing network was proposed to generate the lower boundary vector which allows sufficient products to satisfy the demand. In terms of such a vector, the system reliability can be derived easily.     

Customer demand prediction of service-oriented manufacturing incorporating customer satisfaction

With the emergence of individualised and personalised customer demands, the interaction of service and product has come into the sight of manufacturers and thus promoted the arising of service-oriented manufacturing (SOM), a new business mode that combines manufacturing and service. Be similar to the conventional manufacturing, the customer demand prediction (CDP) of SOM is very important since it is the foundation of the following manufacturing stages. As there are always tight and frequent interactions between service providers and customers in SOM, the customer satisfaction would significantly influence the customer demand of the following purchasing periods. To cope with this issue, a novel CDP approach for SOM incorporating customer satisfaction is proposed. Firstly, the structural relationships among customer satisfaction index and the influence factors are quantitatively modelled by using the structural equation model. Secondly, to reduce the adverse effect of multiple structural input data and small sample size, the least square support vector mechanism is employed to predict customer demand. Finally, the CDP of the air conditioner compressor which is a typical SOM product is implemented as the real-case example, and the effectiveness and validity of the proposed approach is elaborated from the prediction results analysis and comparison.