计算机辅助可重构制造系统设计

可重构制造系统是为了快速而准确地提供响应新的高层需求所需的生产能力和生产同一零件族内的新零件所需的制造功能，从一开始就设计成可面向系统级和生产资源级快速而又以有竞争力的成本重构的制造系统，文中分析了可重构制造系统的设计方法及其特征，提出了计算机辅助可重构制造系统设计这一新的研究方向，说明了包括动态适应学习识别机制，建模分析与性能优化，专家系统、集成设计等模块的设计机辅助可重建制造系统设计的流程，实现了可重构制造系统的集成设计。     

Assessment of reconfiguration schemes for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems based on resources and lead time

Reconfigurable manufacturing equipment is developed to meet the growing demand for more agile production. Agile manufacturing technology can improve the turnover of a company if it enables fast market introduction for volume production. Modular reconfiguration, defined as changing the structure of the machine, enables larger variation of products on a single manufacturing system; these solutions are called Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS). The quality of RMS, and the required resources to bring it to reliable production, is largely determined by a swift execution of the reconfiguration process. This paper proposes a method to compare alternatives for the ways to implement reconfiguration. Three classes of reconfiguration are defined to distinguish the impact of the proposed alternatives. The procedure uses a recently introduced index method for development of RMS process modules, based on the Axiomatic Design methodology. Weighting factors are used to calculate the resources and lead time needed to implement the reconfiguration process. Application of the method leads to quick comparison of alternatives in the early stage of development. Successful execution of the method was demonstrated for the manufacturing process of a 3D measuring probe.     

Digital twin-enabled Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System for fixed-position assembly islands

The layout of fixed-position assembly islands is widely used in the heavy equipment industry, where the product remains at one assembly island for its entire assembly period, while required workers, equipment, and materials are moved to the island according to the assembly plan. Such layout is not only suitable for producing bulky or fragile products, but also offers considerable flexibility and competitive operational efficiency for products with medium variety and volumes. However, due to inherent complexity of the product, sophisticated assembly operations heavily rely on skilled operators, and the complexity and uncertainty are high and amplified by such massive manual interventions as well as the unique routing patterns of the fixed-position assembly process. Aiming at reducing the complexity and uncertainty, this paper introduces a digital twin-enabled Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System (DT-GiMS) for fixed-position assembly islands. Inspired by the success of graduation ceremony, an assembly system-Graduation Manufacturing System (GMS) is proposed for fixed-position assembly islands, in which job tickets, setup tickets, operation tickets, and logistics tickets are designed to organize the production activities. Following the concept of digital twin, unified digital representations with appropriate sets of information are created at object level, product level, and system level, respectively. Through Internet of Things (IoT), smart gateway, Web 3D and industrial wearable technologies, vital information including identity, status, geometric model, and production process can be captured and mapped in physical space, and converged and synchronized with their digital representations in twin (cloud) space on a real-time basis. The overall framework of DT-GiMS is presented with physical layer, digital layer, and service layer. Real-time convergence and synchronization among them ensure that right resources are allocated and utilized to the right activities at the right time with enhanced visibility. Considering customer demand and production capacity constraints, real-time ticket pool management mechanisms are proposed to manage production activities in a near-optimal way under DT-GiMS. With the support of cloud-based services provided in service layer in DT-GiMS, managers could easily make production decisions, and onsite operators could efficiently complete their daily tasks with nearly error-free operations with enhanced visibility. A demonstrative case is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed concept and approach.     

A support-design framework for Cooperative Robots systems in labor-intensive manufacturing processes

Manufacturing processes and industrial systems gradually change their traditional layouts and configurations, preparing to introduce novel integrated human-robot technologies as collaborative robots and exoskeletons. Whether mass customization of lot size and the production mix discourages the adoption of capital-intensive automation, collaborative robots become affordable and effective and a hotspot of the debate on manufacturing systems. This paper provides a novel support-design framework for the cooperative robot system in labor-intensive manufacturing processes to aid layout and task scheduling design. Through an iterative closed-loop methodology, this framework explores the impact of a cooperative robot in a labour-intensive manufacturing system like the production facility of a food service company. The framework leads the designer through the re-layout of the end-of-line, the economic and technical feasibility analyses, using simulation to estimate payback and ergonomics benefits for workers. Within the proposed layout, we state that adopting a cooperative cobot for the end-of-line is affordable and ergonomically convenient without representing a safety threat for workers. The testbed confirms the framework as an enabling tool for human-robot technologies integration in current manufacturing systems under budget and workers-driven constraints.     

ORCA-FMS: a dynamic architecture for the optimized and reactive control of flexible manufacturing scheduling

Reactive and effective hybrid manufacturing control architectures, combining hierarchy and heterarchy adapted to the current constraints of the industrial market and its environment were created. In this article, a new generic hybrid control architecture called ORCA (dynamic Architecture for an Optimized and Reactive Control) is first proposed. This hybrid architecture is able to dynamically and partially switch between a hierarchical predictive architecture and a heterarchical reactive architecture, if an event forbidding the planned behavior to be followed occurs. In this article, this architecture was applied to a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) problem and denoted ORCA-FMS. ORCA-FMS was tested on an existing manufacturing cell with simulations and real experiments to prove the applicability and the effectiveness of this kind of hybrid architecture in an industrial environment.     

基于RMC的可重构制造系统设备布局优化研究*

为实现多品种变批量生产制造系统阵列式布局的动态重构,提出一种新的设备布局优化方法.建立了可重构制造系统(RMS)设备优化选择数学模型,设计了基于蚁群优化和阶序聚类算法的可重构制造单元(RMC)动态重构算法.以交货期内最小成本为目标,引入系统复杂度和系统响应度从系统能力角度完善了实现RMS重构的约束条件,最终完成了可重构制造系统设备布局优化.最后通过布局实例仿真验证该方法的可行性和有效性.     

Towards Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing from Zero-Inventory Just-In-Time production

Over the past half-century, manufacturers have strived to achieve “Zero Inventory (ZI)” manufacturing, which puts the burden on suppliers to build their warehouses nearby production lines to meet the strict time delivery requirements of ZI production. Considerable improvements in manufacturing processes have been made. However, this practice in the meanwhile brings excessive warehousing operations along the supply chain. Recently, massive up-front investment has been made by some larger manufacturers for industrial 4.0 and warehouse automation to facilitate warehousing operations, such as put away and picking. However, warehouse operation activities enhanced by automation are still non-value-adding and current practice of redundant handling process implies continuous cost increase with the demand expanding. Therefore, it is of significance to simplify the corresponding operations as much as possible. This paper makes a comprehensive introduction to a new manufacturing paradigm named Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing (ZWSM) from the concept, practices, principles, and core technologies. ZWSM basically aims to avoid traditional non-value-adding warehousing operations such as put away and order picking, as well as to reduce the warehousing space for operations to the minimum. First, prototype layout and basic practices under ZWSM are proposed. Second, synchronization, unitization and uncertainty hedging, which are the key principles to achieve the ZWSM, are explicitly introduced. Third, A Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing Platform (ZWSMP) is developed with the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled infrastructures. Corresponding logistics services are presented to provide information visibility and achieve operations improvement. A case study of the Hong Kong prefabrication construction project is used to demonstrate the materials delivery process among different supply chain partners to provide a basis for zero-warehousing achievement.     

Industrial Additive Manufacturing: A manufacturing systems perspective

As Additive Manufacturing becomes increasingly prevalent in commercial manufacturing environments, the need to effectively consider optimal strategies for management is increased. At present most research has focused on individual machines, yet there is a wealth of evidence to suggest competitive manufacturing is best managed from a systems perspective. Through 14 case studies developed with four long-established Additive Manufacturing companies this paper explores the conduct of Industrial AM in contemporary manufacturing environments. A multitude of activities, mechanisms, and controls are identified through this detailed investigation of Additive Manufacturing operations. Based on these empirical results a general four component Industrial Additive Manufacturing System is developed, together with the identification of potential strategic opportunities to enhance future manufacturing.     

A concurrent engineering approach to selective implementation of alternative processes

During the last decade, integration between design and manufacturing has shown to be a major competitive weapon and much research work has been carried out about considering at the product design stage production process issues.Most of the literature on such techniques focuses on integrating the design of a product and the design of its manufacturing processes, disregarding issues related to the design and management of the manufacturing system. Nonetheless, decisions taken at the product and process design stage could have an influence on typical production planning and control issues such as, for example, minimising lead times and maximising machine utilisation.Many research works show the advantage of a higher process flexibility, in terms of machine utilisation, manufacturing lead time, inventory level, and the like (see, for example, Tsubone and Horikawa, The International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems 11 (1999) 83 or Ferreira and Wysk, Journal of Manufacturing System 19 (2001)), but developing alternative machine possibility has a cost that is not negligible (International Journal of Production Economics 48 (1997) 237). Therefore, guidelines are needed for identifying for what items and for which operations to develop alternative processes.In this paper, the relationship between alternative processes availability and manufacturing system performances are investigated, showing that the advantage of additional alternative process decreases as the number of alternatives increases, and that given a certain number of alternative processes developed, there is a strong difference in performances depending on what alternative processes have been implemented. Then a new procedure is presented for guiding in selecting for which operations to implement alternative processes in order to maximise the flexibility advantages limiting the implementation cost.The proposed procedure is then tested, under different operating conditions, against a practical rule by means of a simulation model.     

Agility and production flow layouts: An analytical decision analysis

The term ‘agile manufacturing’ has referred to operational aspects of a manufacturing company concerning their ability to produce customized products at mass production prices and with short lead times. A core issue faced within agile manufacturing is the need for appropriate and supporting production and operations systems. Many design dimensions of agility and agile manufacturing exist. To help attain this goal for integrating the many design dimensions, operations infrastructure and capacity must be carefully planned to manage production flow, and thus production layout planning takes on an increasingly important role. Given the importance of these dimensions in response to agility, this paper seeks to make a contribution by providing insights into a decision aid for evaluating production flow layouts that support and enhance the agile manufacture of products. Layout design has a significant impact on the performance of a manufacturing or service industry system and has been an active research area for many decades. Strategic evaluation of production layouts requires consideration of both qualitative and quantitative factors (managerial, organizational, and technical). This paper makes use of the Analytical Network Process (ANP) which captures interdependencies among different criteria, sub-criteria and dimensions, an evident characteristic of production flow layouts in complex agile manufacturing environments. An application case study exemplifying the practical usefulness of this type of model describes how management, after implementation of the model, made a mid-course correction related to the production layout initially selected.     

An approach to regulating machine sharing in reconfigurable back-end semiconductor manufacturing

By complying with the operational philosophy of virtual production lines, a back-end semiconductor manufacturing system can be controlled and managed with better reconfigurability. However, due to the absence of a fully-integrated information system and the gaining popularity of distributed computing, machine reconfiguration decisions are made by machine controllers on the shop floor where heterarchical control architecture is typically used. This research investigates how non-cooperative game theory could be applied for facilitating the decision process reconfiguration decision-making at the machine controller level as machines are competed by multiple jobs streams. This paper presents how material flow traffic can be better regulated in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment. A study using an industrial pilot system is discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, in which heuristics are used to determine the game specification.     

Achieving e-Manufacturing: multihead control and web technology for the implementation of a manufacturing execution system

Intelligent Manufacturing Systems requires advanced and efficient manufacturing technologies, management and procedures in order to achieve value creation in global markets. E-Manufacturing is the set of information technologies that allows companies to achieve on demand manufacturing through the integration of e-business applications. Cornerstone of this concept are Demand Flow Technology, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Digital Operational Method Sheets (OMS) which are vital to control shop floor operations where there is a need to balance manual and automated operations. Specially, Mexican companies face large diversity of products and multiple production lines, with high turnaround rotation of the workers. A low cost solution that integrates Demand Flow Technology, MES with Digital OMS is described, the system has been developed using LINUX servers, Multi-head control technology (multiple monitors to a single server) and a WEB based environment. This technological solution offers an affordable, stable, and high performance solution to transform the production into a more balanced system with shorter and faster cycles allowing a company to achieve e-Manufacturing. Received: February 2005/Accepted: January 2006     

制造系统的可重构布局设计

研究重构系统的新布局具有重要的理论与实际意义 .本文讨论了制造系统可重构布局研究的目标、对象、基础及研究范畴 ,提出了利用模拟退火方法寻找重构布局最优解的搜索算法 .仿真实验验证了算法的有效性     

基于Virtools的制造车间仿真系统的开发

利用虚拟现实技术对制造车间进行仿真能够帮助工程师在设计时即可通过人机交互进行生产线的动态布局和评估。文章以某集团油缸生产车间建设为背景,利用Virtools开发车间仿真系统,提出了一种分层次仿真的方法以适应系统分阶段开发情况,设计了系统总体架构及开发流程,通过三维建模及脚本制作实现了系统的各功能,并最终将其发布成web网页。     

考虑数据安全的工业互联网制造服务QoS多方联合预测

工业互联网平台支持各类制造资源的泛在连接,能够为不同用户提供全生命周期的制造服务。制造服务QoS（quality of service）在服务匹配、选择和共享中扮演重要角色。然而,如何在保护数据安全的前提下充分利用工业互联网平台下不同企业的制造服务特征数据,对提高QoS预测精度至关重要。为此,提出了一种QoS多方联合预测方法。首先,根据各制造服务商在本地长期累计的相关数据,建立用户—制造服务QoS关系矩阵;进而,在保护用户偏好信息安全下共享企业间制造服务的潜在特征向量实现QoS联合训练,同时应用同态加密与差分隐私加密机制保证传输数据的安全;最后,应用随机梯度下降法迭代更新模型参数以预测缺失的制造服务QoS值。实验以WS-dream数据集与案例企业制造服务共享平台数据为例验证了该方法的有效性,结果表明该方法能够在保护数据安全的前提下,有效地提高模型预测的准确度。     

A framework for manufacturing system reconfiguration and optimisation utilising digital twins and modular artificial intelligence

Digital twins and artificial intelligence have shown promise for improving the robustness, responsiveness, and productivity of industrial systems. However, traditional digital twin approaches are often only employed to augment single, static systems to optimise a particular process. This article presents a paradigm for combining digital twins and modular artificial intelligence algorithms to dynamically reconfigure manufacturing systems, including the layout, process parameters, and operation times of numerous assets to allow system decision-making in response to changing customer or market needs. A knowledge graph has been used as the enabler for this system-level decision-making. A simulation environment has been constructed to replicate the manufacturing process, with the example here of an industrial robotic manufacturing cell. The simulation environment is connected to a data pipeline and an application programming interface to assist the integration of multiple artificial intelligence methods. These methods are used to improve system decision-making and optimise the configuration of a manufacturing system to maximise user-selectable key performance indicators. In contrast to previous research, this framework incorporates artificial intelligence for decision-making and production line optimisation to provide a framework that can be used for a wide variety of manufacturing applications. The framework has been applied and validated in a real use case, with the automatic reconfiguration resulting in a process time improvement of approximately 10%.     

工业机器人的计算机控制

主要讨论了现代制造系统中工业机器人的计算机控制 ,并以IBM7575/ 7576制造控制系统为研究对象 ,介绍了主计算机与工业机器人控制器之间的串行通信 ,以及串行通信协议的建立。最后还叙述了用VisualBasic语言实现主计算机与工业机器人控制器之间的主要通信程序     

Design of a suitable production management system for a manufacturing company

This paper reports on the design of a suitable production management system (PMS) for a manufacturing company, located in Western Australia. The company was experiencing problems in scheduling and plant layout leading to further problems in materials flow, labour control, inventory and purchasing, material handling system, and production space.

Group technology (GT) was used to design a new plant layout. A G.T. algorithm was developed to minimise machine duplications. A Kanban system was designed to assist execution of scheduling based on a pull system. The design was tested by simulation using actual data collected on existing operations.     

New IT driven rapid manufacturing for emergency response

COVID-19, which is rampant around the world, has seriously disrupted people's normal work and living. To respond to public urgent needs such as COVID-19, emergency supplies are essential. However, due to the special requirements of supplies, when an emergency occurs, the supply reserve mostly cannot cope with the high demand. Given the importance of emergency supplies in public emergencies, rapid response manufacturing of emergency supplies is a necessity. The faster emergency supplies and facilities are manufactured, the more likely the pandemic can be controlled and the more human lives are saved. Besides, new generation information technology represented by cloud computing, IoT, big data, AI, etc. is rapidly developing and can be widely used to address such situations. Therefore, rapid response manufacturing enabled by New IT is presented to quickly meet emergency demands. And some policy suggestions are presented.     

Reconfigurable Control Structure for Robots in Assembly

The increased use of changeable characteristics in modern manufacturing and robotic systems and applications call for improved system control design that offers some degree of reconfigurability. The need for control reconfiguration of robotic systems arises due to some inherent characteristics of the robotic system, variations of robot parameters due to environmental changes, major task changes typical in production changeover or manufacturing system reconfiguration, or geometry changes due to the reconfiguration of modular manipulators. In this paper, a reconfigurable controller, the Supervisory Control Switching System (SCSS), is proposed to meet the new on-line demands for changeability in robotic systems. The SCSS is capable of selecting the most suitable controller for a particular task or situation, from separate controllers designed a priori. The applicability and effectiveness of the developed switching control scheme have been illustrated through computer simulations of an AdeptOne SCARA manipulators carrying out assembly tasks.