Preliminary design and manufacturing planning integration using web-based intelligent agents

Software agents have been increasingly used in the product and process development in industry over the past years due to the rapid evolvement of the Internet technology. This paper describes agents for the integration of conceptual design and process planning. Agents provide mechanisms to interact with each other. This mechanism is important since both of those processes involve negotiations for optimization. A set of design and planning software agents has been developed. These agents are used in a computer-based collaborative environment, called a multi-agent platform. The main purpose of developing such a platform is to support product preliminary design, optimize product form and structure, and reduce the manufacturing cost in the early design stage. The agents on the platform have access to a knowledge base that contains design and planning rules. These rules are derived from an analysis of design factors that influence process and resource planning, such as product material, form, shape complexity, features, dimension, tolerance, surface condition, production volume, and production rate. These rules are used by process planning agents to provide process planners with information regarding selecting preliminary manufacturing processes, determining manufacturing resources, and constructing feedback information to product designers. Additionally, the agents communicate with WEB servers, and they are accessible by users through Internet browsers. During performing design and planning tasks, agents access the data pertinent to design and manufacturing processes by the programming interfaces of existing computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacturing system. The agents are supported by a developed prototype agent platform. The agents and the platform enable the information exchange among agents, based on a previously developed integrated design and manufacturing process object model.     

Towards a generic design method for reconfigurable manufacturing systems: Analysis and synthesis of current design methods and evaluation of supportive tools

In today’s global manufacturing environment, changes are inevitable and something that every manufacturer must respond to and take advantage of, whether it is in regards to technology changes, product changes, or changes in the manufacturing processes. The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) meets this challenge through the ability to rapidly and efficiently change capacity and functionality, which is the reason why it has been widely labelled the manufacturing paradigm of the future. However, design of the RMS represents a significant challenge compared to the design of traditional manufacturing systems, as it should be designed for efficient production of multiple variants, as well as multiple product generations over its lifetime. Thus, critical decisions regarding the degree of scalability and convertibility of the system must be considered in the design phase, which affects the abilities to reconfigure the system in accordance with changes during its operating lifetime. However, in current research it is indicated that conventional manufacturing system design methods do not support the design of an RMS and that a systematic RMS design method is lacking, despite the fact that numerous contributions exist. Moreover, there is currently only limited evidence for the breakthrough of reconfigurability in industry. Therefore, the research presented in this paper aims at synthesizing current contributions into a generic method for RMS design. Initially, currently available design methods for RMS are reviewed, in terms of classifying and comparing their content, structure, and scope, which leads to a synthesis of the reviewed methods into a generic design method. In continuation of this, the paper includes a discussion of practical implications related to carrying out the design, including an identification of potential challenges and an assessment of which tools that can be applied to support the design. Conclusively, further areas for research are indicated, which provides valuable knowledge of how to develop and realize the benefits of reconfigurability in industry.     

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems: Key to future manufacturing

Presented in this article is a review of manufacturing techniques and introduction of reconfigurable manufacturing systems; a new paradigm in manufacturing which is designed for rapid adjustment of production capacity and functionality, in response to new market conditions. A definition of reconfigurable manufacturing systems is outlined and an overview of available manufacturing techniques, their key drivers and enablers, and their impacts, achievements and limitations is presented. A historical review of manufacturing from the point-of-view of the major developments in the market, technology and sciences issues affecting manufacturing is provided. The new requirements for manufacturing are discussed and characteristics of reconfigurable manufacturing systems and their key role in future manufacturing are explained. The paper is concluded with a brief review of specific technologies and research issues related to RMSs.     

Digital twins-based smart manufacturing system design in Industry 4.0: A review

A smart manufacturing system (SMS) is a multi-field physical system with complex couplings among various components. Usually, designers in various fields can only design subsystems of an SMS based on the limited cognition of dynamics. Conducting SMS designs concurrently and developing a unified model to effectively imitate every interaction and behavior of manufacturing processes are challenging. As an emerging technology, digital twins can achieve semi-physical simulations to reduce the vast time and cost of physical commissioning/reconfiguration by the early detection of design errors/flaws of the SMS. However, the development of the digital twins concept in the SMS design remains vague. An innovative Function-Structure-Behavior-Control-Intelligence-Performance (FSBCIP) framework is proposed to review how digital twins technologies are integrated into and promote the SMS design based on a literature search in the Web of Science database. The definitions, frameworks, major design steps, new blueprint models, key enabling technologies, design cases, and research directions of digital twins-based SMS design are presented in this survey. It is expected that this survey will shed new light on urgent industrial concerns in developing new SMSs in the Industry 4.0 era.     

Integrated product and manufacturing system platforms supporting the design of personalized medicines

Pharmaceutical product customization, a prerequisite for personalized medicines, is currently a widely researched topic. Patient characteristics can be mapped and translated into parameters for designing patients’ individual treatment, i.e., the dosage form. However, current pharmaceutical manufacturing is dominated by mass production and lacks the capability and flexibility required to produce customized products. Mass customization is a proven successful approach in, for example, the manufacturing industry and thus has been discussed as an enabler for pharmaceutical product customization but has never been fully explored in a pharmaceutical context. Inspired by mass customization approaches in the manufacturing industry, this study proposes a novel methodology to develop integrated product and manufacturing system platforms for pharmaceutical products supporting a mass customization paradigm. The proposed methodology establishes sets of product and manufacturing system platform variants and suggests an approach to feasible platform design selection. The applicability of the proposed methodology is illustrated for diabetes treatment as a selected case example. Integrated platform designs are developed for the conventional treatment of a fully integral tablet design and for a design enabling product customization with a modularized tablet design. The manufacturing platforms are still embracing a mass production design in the methodology illustration and should elicit knowledge on the utility of the current production design in a mass customization context. The performance and utility of the respective platform are assessed in terms of production cost and patient benefit. The results suggest a substantial increase in patient benefit afforded by the modularized tablet design, however the production cost is increased. This trade-off between the production cost and patient benefit thus calls for novel manufacturing system concepts to achieve the feasible manufacturing of customized pharmaceutical products.     

A standard manufacturing information model to support design for manufacturing in virtual enterprises

Manufacturing enterprises are being forced into greater collaboration with customers and suppliers in order to produce quality products in smaller batches, shorter lead times and with greater variety. Consequently, the design-for-manufacturing task must be conducted in these virtual and distributed enterprises across traditional organizational boundaries. This paper proposes the use of standard information models to support the product realization process. While extensive work has been performed in developing product data models little effort has been performed in developing a manufacturing model. The design-for-manufacturing stages are identified with their requisite information requirements. Different approaches used to model various aspects of manufacturing processes are reviewed and found inadequate for supporting the entire design-for-manufacturing task. The development of a standard manufacturing systems information model written in EXPRESS and based upon the modelling me thodology adhered to by standard for the exchange of product (STEP) is proposed to fill the void. Initial developments in this area are discussed, the model is illustrated with an example, and the potential benefits to manufacturing are reviewed.     

基于结构树的产品制造质量信息建模

为了给面向制造质量的设计提供全面支持,需要对制造质量信息进行有效管理。制造质量信息的组织在其管理中具有重要作用,考虑到结构树作为产品生命周期信息载体的特点,提出了制造质量信息的结构树建模方法。分析了产品构成以及通用信息树的结构,构建了制造质量信息的结构树模型。分析了制造质量信息树的结构、节点、节点及其属性操作,给出了制造质量信息树的构建方法与步骤。以某重型汽车的变速箱为实例,建立了变速箱制造质量信息的结构树模型。     

Computer-aided design for manufacturing process selection

This paper describes an expert system that helps designers select a manufacturing process in the early stage of product design. First, the paper focuses on net-shape manufacturing processes and identifies the major factors that affect the selection of an appropriate process. Examples of these factors include shape, production volume and material. A versatile methodology should consider all the factors simultaneously in assessing the suitability of the candidate processes. The proposed system uses the concept of design compatibility analysis to represent the suitability of candidate processes with respect to the given product specifications. The system uses this knowledge to eliminate incompatible candidates and rank the compatible set of processes. A prototype system called DFPS uses HyperCard and Prolog to implement the proposed methodology. DFPS also contains information related to each process.     

From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing

Cloud computing is changing the way industries and enterprises do their businesses in that dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. This model creates a brand new opportunity for enterprises. In this paper, some of the essential features of cloud computing are briefly discussed with regard to the end-users, enterprises that use the cloud as a platform, and cloud providers themselves. Cloud computing is emerging as one of the major enablers for the manufacturing industry; it can transform the traditional manufacturing business model, help it to align product innovation with business strategy, and create intelligent factory networks that encourage effective collaboration. Two types of cloud computing adoptions in the manufacturing sector have been suggested, manufacturing with direct adoption of cloud computing technologies and cloud manufacturing—the manufacturing version of cloud computing. Cloud computing has been in some of key areas of manufacturing such as IT, pay-as-you-go business models, production scaling up and down per demand, and flexibility in deploying and customizing solutions. In cloud manufacturing, distributed resources are encapsulated into cloud services and managed in a centralized way. Clients can use cloud services according to their requirements. Cloud users can request services ranging from product design, manufacturing, testing, management, and all other stages of a product life cycle.     

Collaborative composition of processes in holonic manufacturing systems

Although it provides a flexible architecture to deal with changes and uncertainties, holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) also pose challenges in design and implementation. A challenge is to design a problem solving environment to guide the holons in HMS such that the decisions made by the individual holons as a whole collaboratively compose the production processes for the tasks. The objective of this paper is to propose a problem solving environment for the composition of minimal cost processes in HMS. Given a specific product type and due date, the problem is to dynamically compose a complete process in HMS to process the product by the due date. To achieve the objective, we combine multi-agent systems technology with Petri nets in this paper. We first propose architecture and a two-layer contract net protocol to describe the negotiation between order holons, product holons and resource holons in HMS. To determine whether it is feasible for a set product holons and resource holons to compose a process for an order holon, we propose Petri net models to capture the workflows and activities in product holons and resource holons, respectively. To optimize the cost in the composed manufacturing process, the concept of activity-based costing is adopted to assign the cost of the activities to Petri nets. The advantages of our design methodology include specification of workflows and resource activities with PNML to minimize the cost. To realize the two-layer contract net protocol relies on a mechanism for a holon to discover the services provided by other holons. We proposed a scheme for publication and discovery of holon services based on FIPA compliant multi-agent system platform. Based on the service publication and discovery scheme, interactions between holons with the two-layer contract net protocol can be realized. We develop a HMS system to solve the process composition problem.     

Development of an Internet-enabled interactive fixture design system

Fixture design is a complex and an intuitive process. An efficient fixture design system is essential to cut costs and reduce the product lead-time. In today's manufacturing landscape, various computer-aided systems exist to aid the various stages of manufacturing. A fixture design system should be able to transfer information with the various other systems to bring about a seamless product design and manufacturing environment. A fixture design system should also be portable on different operating platforms. This paper addresses the development of an Internet-enabled interactive fixture design system. The Internet and the use of XML as a file format provide a means for the transfer of information and knowledge between the various computer-aided manufacturing systems. The system has been implemented using Java and is based on a three-tier Thin Client-Fat Server architecture. This ensures the platform independent performance of the system. A locating scheme independent interactive fixture design method has also been developed in this work for detailed fixture design.     

Applications of group technology in distributed manufacturing

This paper discusses the systematic use of group technology (GT) to support important activities of distributed manufacturing including design indexing and retrieval, variant design, variant process planning, and design critiquing. We introduce an Object-Oriented Group Technology (OOGT) scheme, which captures design data critical to the product's manufacture. Our approach uses a STEP-based product information model to generate the OOGT data automatically. The latter are then used to conduct an efficient search for similar products manufactured by selected companies and to retrieve and use information about the manufacturing processes and performance of these similar products.     

Expert systems for manufacturing cell simulation and design

Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) is approached by means of the application of Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and other CA techniques, methods and programs/program systems. These programs are often implemented as knowledge-based, or expert systems and in this way they became typical examples of engineering application of artificial intelligence. The production task of CIM systems is solved by using flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). FMSs built up from smaller, complex units, i.e. from flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) have several advantages. The design and the operation of manufacturing systems need new, sophisticated methods to utilize all the embedded benefits of the sophisticated and expensive elements installed for production purposes. New methods like knowledge processing technology, cooperative problem-solving techniques, etc., offer wide possibilities to design more reasonable systems. This paper describes prototype expert systems that make use of different knowledge-based tools and techniques to design (configure, reconfigure) and simulate manufacturing cells, taking into consideration technological plans and other relevant information.     

Modular production systems: a new manufacturing paradigm

It is well recognized that manufacturers of consumer goods throughout the world are facing major new demands, including shorter product life-cycles and increasing competition. In response, companies are restructuring and moving away from traditional process-centred work practices in favour of concurrent engineering methods. In particular, design for manufacture has gained widespread recognition as a means of reducing production costs and lead times. However, optimal design for manufacture is difficult to achieve using current-day work organization and business structures. An underlying problem is the lack of a scientific framework for production. To address this need, this paper proposes a radical and far-reaching new manufacturing paradigm based upon on building production systems from standardized modular machines. The manufacturing concept, termed modular production systems (MPS), is aimed specifically at hard low- to medium-technology consumer products, as typified by goods such as childrens toys and kitchen appliances. The rationale for MPS as a means of enabling concurrent product and production system design is put forward, and the long-term implications and work required to establish the concept are discussed.     

Expanding bottleneck management from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes

Bottlenecks inhibit the performance of companies. Up to now, bottleneck management research has concentrated on manufacturing processes, while neglecting product design and engineering processes. This research fills this gap through developing and testing of a new bottleneck management concept for product design and engineering processes. The new concept is developed using a system theory modelling approach and comprises of four bottleneck management counter measures. Two propositions were developed to test the concept through an event-discrete simulation model. The simulation is grounded on empirical data from three design-driven companies and tests the impact of the four bottleneck management counter measures on the performance of product design and engineering processes. The findings from the simulation confirm the applicability of the newly developed bottleneck concept to improve the performance of product design and engineering processes. In doing so, this research study expands bottleneck management for the first time from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes.     

Architectural requirements for rapid development of agile manufacturing systems

As product life cycle becomes shortened, high product quality becomes necessary for survival, and continuous and unexpected change becomes key obstacles in success, the need for a method of rapidly and cost-effectively developing products, production facilities and supporting software including design, process planning, shop floor control systems becomes urgent. The essence of this concept of manufacturing would be characterized by adopting a new term “agility”. Agile manufacturing can be successfully accomplished using various well-defined system architecture. This paper provides a primary sketch of architectural requirements for rapid development of agile manufacturing systems.There are several aspects of system architecture : control, function, process, information, communication, distribution, development, and implementation.In the past, the confusion of those architectures prohibited the successful construction of the automated CIM systems.     

A collaborative and integrated platform to support distributed manufacturing system using a service-oriented approach based on cloud computing paradigm

Today's manufacturing enterprises struggle to adopt cost-effective manufacturing systems. Overview of the recent manufacturing enterprises shows that successful global manufacturing enterprises have distributed their manufacturing capabilities over the globe. The successes of global manufacturing enterprises depend upon the entire worldwide integration of their product development processes and manufacturing operations that are distributed over the globe. Distributed manufacturing agents' collaboration and manufacturing data integrity play a major role in global manufacturing enterprises' success. There are number of works, conducted to enable the distributed manufacturing agents to collaborate with each other. To achieve the manufacturing data integrity through manufacturing processes, numbers of solutions have been proposed which one of the successful solutions is to use ISO 10303 (STEP) standard. However, adopting this standard one can recognize antonym effects of integration and collaboration approaches that weaken both integration and collaboration capabilities of manufacturing agents. In our latest work, we had developed an integrated and collaborative manufacturing platform named LAYMOD. Albeit the platform in question was through enough to be applied in various collaborative and integrated CAx systems, its embedded structure hampers its application for collaboration in distributed manufacturing systems. To achieve an integrated and collaborative platform for distributed manufacturing agents, this paper proposes a service-oriented approach. This approach is originated from cloud computing paradigm known as one of the technologies which enables a major transformation in manufacturing industry. Also, to maintain the product data integration based on the STEP standard, a new service-oriented approach is proposed. This approach is in parallel to the new capability of the STEP standard for supporting XML data structures. The result is a new platform named XMLAYMOD. XMLAYMOD is able to support distributed manufacturing collaboration and data integration based on the STEP standard. The different aspects of this platform to fulfill the requirements of distributed collaboration and also to overcome the lacks of the STEP standard are discussed through a brief case study.     

Service-oriented manufacturing: a new product pattern and manufacturing paradigm

Service plays an increasingly important role in modern manufacturing: (a) Services and physical products are integrated into one product service system (PSS) to provide a comprehensive solution for customers; (b) The companies involved in offering PSS focus on specialized sectors, and provide producer services for one another. In this paper, the new product pattern together with the innovative manufacturing paradigm is called service-oriented manufacturing. The competitive advantage of a PSS can be originated from products or services, and the ownership of PSS’s may or may not be transferred from sellers to buyers during transactions. Various PSS’s were categorized into three classes. The characteristics of each type of PSS’s and the shift between them are discussed. Many companies, which provide producer services and manufacturing services to one another, form a service-based manufacturing network. The reasons why producer services act as intermediate goods among different companies and motivations for companies to outsource their business processes are analyzed economically. Many companies in different segments of the production-chain may have discrepant profitability. Technology strength and industry insight competences are adopted to explain the discrepant values added from various segments along the production chain. Service-oriented manufacturing is summarized from the perspectives of business model, industry insight and technology strength (BIT).     

Expert systems: An application in flexible manufacturing

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are needed to provide manufacturing operations with the capability to adjust, in real time, to changes in the manufacturing environment. Realization of the goals of flexible manufacturing is governed by the ability of the FMS to maintain adequate information on the factory to assist in generating scenarios from product planning to operations and performance. This leads to a view where the factory is represented as an integrated information system. To facilitate the analysis of information requirements and the design of information systems for flexible manufacturing, an expert support system (ESS) which can be used to model and study the various structures is described. This ESS uses the information cell model to build these information structures. Petri net representations of these structures and their interactions are then constructed. The ESS may now be used to exercise these models and study their performance using time and cost measures.     

Part design using manufacturing features

This paper presents a methodology by which manufacturability data is used to drive the design process. The system allows a designer to determine the features to be considered. He provides the basic geometric parameters for each feature and passes them to the modeling system for instantiations. Tolerances and surface finish allow the system to derive manufacturing implications used by the designer to review the design. The physical parameters, in addition to the processing information, lead to an integrated model which may be used by both the designer and the manufacturing personnel. This procedure may be invoked at any level of the design process and contribute to a final manufacturable design. The philosophy employed in the development of this work is to define manufacturing features as instances of generic ones with specific properties and processing methods. The design features obtain their geometric superclasses from a commercially available package of solid primitives thus allowing for the part to be graphically displayed.