A new approach to modelling,control and simulation of knowledgeable manufacturing cell

The running of the knowledgeable manufacturing cell (KMC) is a typical discrete event dynamic process. Methods used to model and analyse discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS) include Petri net and automata theory. In this paper, a new matrix-automaton is proposed to model the KMC and solve the task control problems existing in the KMC. The automaton is of structured property and can be used to analyse the dynamic performance of the KMC. Stochastic dynamic programming is used to derive the optimal task control strategy of the automaton, and a simulation method and program are proposed to simulate the running of the KMC. The matrix-automaton model of an experimental KMC including m manufacturing agents and n classes of workpieces is built and solved by the methods in this paper. Compared with the random control principle, the objective function value of the control strategy in this paper is obviously lower, which testifies the validity and feasibility of the control strategy.     

Manufacturing strategies for the ecosystem-based manufacturing system in the context of 3D printing

This paper aims to investigate the manufacturing strategies for the manufacturing systems in the context of 3D printing, referring to ecosystem-based manufacturing systems, rather than firm-based and network-based ones. A case study approach was adopted for this research, as the data was mainly collected via semi-structured interviews with staff members of companies in China. Besides the elements of strategic choices and manufacturing capabilities identified in the extant literature, this research verified three additional strategic choice elements (functional role, platform and solution) and identified two factors (platform openness and solution diversity) to classify an ecosystem-based manufacturing system. Meanwhile, four manufacturing capabilities of the ecosystem-based manufacturing system have been identified: collaborative manufacturing flexibility, rapid thriftiness ability, self-customisation and co-evolved design capability. The research results contribute to the area of manufacturing strategy via expanding its view from the firm and network levels to the ecosystem level. Meanwhile, the research results present operations managers with an understanding of the strategic choices and manufacturing capabilities of an ecosystem-based manufacturing system in the context of 3D printing.     

Integration of global manufacturing networks and supply chains: a cross case comparison of six global automotive manufacturers

Striving for new business opportunities automotive original equipment manufacturers established overseas plants in emerging markets and global manufacturing networks evolved. In this regard so-called knocked down supply chains have been the key for the establishment of successful overseas operations. Importing all parts required from the original plants in form of easy to be handled kits secures a high product quality and stable supply despite lacking qualification of local workforce and supplier bases. Over time the overseas plants and global manufacturing networks have matured by increasingly taking over value adding processes and integrating local suppliers. However, the supply chain structure and management have not been adapted accordingly and still comprise high inventory buffers and lead times. There is little research on the integrated design of global manufacturing networks and knocked down supply chains. This research aims to contribute to close this research gap by means of a cross-case study with six globally operating OEMs investigating the fit of knocked down supply chains and global manufacturing networks. On the basis of transaction cost theory, we develop an integrated framework to align global manufacturing networks and knocked down supply chain design that can serve as guideline to open logistics performance and cost potentials.     

Linking networks and plant roles: the impact of changing a plant role

Many manufacturing firms are expanding their global footprint to explore new opportunities for efficient and effective production. The strategic perspective on international manufacturing networks involves both the network level and the plant level. A key aspect is the relationship between the network and the role of plants. In this research, we investigate the relationship between the network and plant perspectives in international manufacturing networks. We use an embedded case study that includes five plants in two product networks over a period of three years. We analyse how changing the role of one plant affects the network as well as the roles of the other plants in the networks. We find that decisions on plant roles are, to a very high degree, network decisions and not decisions for individual plants. Based on the insights into the case study, we also develop a framework for mapping manufacturing networks, including market coverage, plant location and site competence.     

The significance of organizational change management for sustainable competitiveness in manufacturing: exploring the firm archetypes

The successful development and deployment of adequate sustainable manufacturing strategies are still open issues and of utmost interest for research and practice. Guided by this particular challenge, we investigate the significance of organisational change management for sustainable competitiveness in manufacturing. By using six case studies from the Lombardia region in Italy and basing our research on the theoretical constructs of competitive aggressiveness and organisational change, we discover four archetypes of companies that show an increasing sustainable competitiveness with an increasing formalism and persistence in organisational change. Our findings suggest that change management practices are conditional hypothesis for creating competitive advantage through sustainability, and implementation gaps do hinder companies in realising the full potential. The study offers guidance to stakeholders, on how change management actions may potentially affect company performance in the manufacturing sector, as well as providing direction on the impact improved planning and leadership instances can have on the sustainability performance.     

Moveable factories: How to enable sustainable widespread manufacturing by local people in regions without manufacturing skills and infrastructure

Moveable factories enable high performance manufacturing. They carry their own power generation and are built to cover rough terrain. Hence, they have potential to enable more widespread modern manufacturing. In this paper, findings are reported from a study addressing two research questions. First, what goods should be produced by local people in regions without manufacturing skills and infrastructure? Second, how can lack of manufacturing skills and infrastructure be overcome? The study comprised literature review, semi-structured interviews, and structured questionnaire. Research participants are from Horn of Africa and from West Africa. All the goods that research participants considered to have potential for profitable production can be made with types of moveable factories that are available. Lack of local skills can be overcome through application of task design using proven techniques. In addition, techniques for designing capable production processes are applicable to moveable production. Established techniques for optimizing mix of production facilities, locations, and routes are also applicable. The robust mobility of moveable factories, and application of proven techniques, reduces the need for manufacturing infrastructure. Moveable factories are relevant to literature and debate concerning re-shoring/on-shoring/right-shoring/best-shoring manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, and distributed manufacturing. The relevance of moveable factories to these topics is analysed in terms of Resource-Based Theory, Knowledge-Based View, and Transaction Cost Economics.     

Impact of the alignment between the strategic and operational levels of a manufacturing enterprise

In today's economic environment, manufacturing organisations compete against each other as part of supply chains (SC). As both the SC strategic level and production floor operational level are interdependent, a misalignment between them has a deep impact on the performance of the manufacturing organisation. For this reason, in this paper we develop an analytical expression of the impact such misalignment has on the manufacturing organisation performance, specifically, its demand fulfillment ability. The usefulness of the analytical expression is illustrated via the development, for the case of a local furniture company, of a system dynamics (SD) simulation model. The SD simulation model is tested under different operational conditions, so the case study company can derive conclusions regarding actions to improve its demand fulfillment ability.     

Interdisciplinary product lines to support the engineering in the machine manufacturing domain

Current market dynamics force today’s companies to manufacture smaller lot sizes up to individual products. As a consequence, companies need to react to such changes; it is hence inevitable to ensure a correct, reliable and flexible engineering process, which allows for managing the highly variant-rich machines. This article investigates the applicability of interdisciplinary product lines for the engineering in the machine manufacturing domain. Therein, four core aspects are addressed: first, the current practice of companies regarding the management of variants is analysed. Second, the requirements to be fulfilled by an interdisciplinary variant management approach are analysed. Third, an interdisciplinary product line approach is presented that aims at overcoming the challenges. Fourth, the benefits and limitations of the approach are discussed and research gaps that need to be addressed in future works are identified.     

Application of blockchain in the field of intelligent manufacturing: Theoretical basis,realistic plights,and development suggestions

Blockchain technology is considered one of the promising technologies of the information technology era. The core features of blockchain, such as decentralization, transparency, high security, and tamper-proof nature, bring great convenience for large-scale social cooperation and data sharing. Blockchain has a broad application prospect in the field of intelligent manufacturing. The key issues of this field, such as distributed collaborative production, industrial big data sharing and security, transparent logistics, and supply chain, are naturally consistent with the core characteristics of the blockchain technology. This study aims to analyze the application of blockchain in the field of intelligent manufacturing. First, we introduce the basic connotation and applications of blockchain. Then, we propose the theoretical basis for the application of blockchain in the field of intelligent manufacturing. Finally, we point out the realistic plights and provide some suggestions to promote the application of blockchain in the field of intelligent manufacturing.     

International relocation and production geography in the European automobile components sector: the case of Spain

This article, based on the various approaches to location theory, analyses relocation processes in the Spanish automobile components industry in order to explain the importance of internal factors at both corporate and production plant levels. While acknowledging that location advantages play a relevant role, we show that changes in production geography can, to a great extent, be explained by corporate strategies, other decision-making mechanisms and firms’ characteristics. The results obtained from an empirical study during the period 2001–2008 show that the search for lower labour costs and corporate restructuring in order to achieve global production efficiency are the main factors determining relocation in the Spanish sector. These processes are facilitated by the operational flexibility of the multinational firms that dominate the sector. Lean supply and technological requirements are the main barriers to such processes of production plant mobility. From the point of view of practical relevance, the article shows that these logistic and technological determinants should be considered by managers in their relocation decisions not only in terms of cost efficiency but also in terms of the risks involved in relocation processes. Any relocation project must include measures to mitigate such risks.     

Alternative production strategies based on the comparison of additive and traditional manufacturing technologies

Additive manufacturing technology has been evolving for several years. New material options, better processing speeds and greater autonomy are some of the characteristics of this technology that are still under research. However, in its current state, many commercially available 3D printers are competing with traditional manufacturing techniques in the fabrication of end-use products. In this paper, different additive manufacturing technologies are compared with injection moulding in a real-world case study. The comparison is conducted in terms of lead time and total production cost. From the case under study, it becomes obvious that none of the additive manufacturing technologies examined is yet able to practically replace injection moulding for medium- and high production volumes. However, when considering low-volume production, both rapid tooling and additive manufacturing may offer an alternative that could result into shorter lead times and decreased total production costs. In addition, the introduction of Additive Manufacturing in a producer’s production portfolio can increase flexibility, reduce warehousing costs and assist the company towards the adoption of a mass customisation business strategy.     

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.     

Reconfiguration: a key to handle exceptions and performance deteriorations in manufacturing operations

During a manufacturing operation, exceptions may occur dynamically and unpredictably. Their occurrence may lead to the degradation of system performance or, in the worst case scenario may interrupt the production process by causing errors in the schedule plan. This paper classifies three families of exceptions: (1) out-of-order events such as machine breakdowns, (2) operational out-of-ordinary events such as rush orders and (3) deteriorations of manufacturing resource performance such as reductions of machines’ utilization. In all cases, in order to maintain an adequate level of system performance, it is necessary to detect exceptions, to diagnose them quickly and to recover them by taking corrective actions to avoid fault propagations. Decisions concerning how to deal with exceptions, i.e. which strategy to implement, depend on the manufacturing environment (dedicated line, flexible system, reconfigurable system or a mix of them) and the advantages arising from using a certain exception handling policy vary from one production system to another. The activity of reconfiguring manufacturing resources has been demonstrated to be a powerful operation strategy to handle machine breakdowns. This paper extends the concept of ‘reconfiguration for exception handling’ to other families of exceptions and proposes reconfiguration for their recovery. The reconfiguration process is handled by an agent-based control system that implements four negotiation processes among manufacturing resource agents.     

Role of traditional Chinese philosophies and new product development under circular economy in private manufacturing enterprise performance

The new product development (NPD) process–performance link has been sufficiently studied in academic research. However, recent NPD process is significantly different from the conventional NPD specifically with the inclusion of sustainability considerations under circular economy (CE) context. In theory, NPD with CE considerations (CE-NPD), compared with the conventional NPD, is associated with higher costs and longer development times. This study empirically examines the effect of the CE-NPD process on both time-to-market (TTM) and profit performance in the context of Chinese private enterprises. In addition, the role of traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism in influencing the CE-NPD process–performance link is also investigated. We find that Confucianism positively moderates the relationship between the CE-NPD process and TTM performance. However, it negatively moderates the CE-NPD-profit link. On the other hand, the moderating effect of Taoism is negative on both the CE-NPD-TTM and CE-NPD-profit links. An interesting finding of this study is that the coexistence of Confucian and Taoist values in NPD workers has the strongest positive impact on the relationship between the CE-NPD process and performance. Our study provides insights on the way in which companies should plan to apply Chinese philosophies during the CE-NPD process to maximise the benefits.     

A mathematical model to evaluate the role of agility enablers and criteria in a manufacturing environment

Modern manufacturing arena necessitates the need for responsiveness by practicing agile manufacturing (AM) principles. AM imposes the transformation of the manufacturing organisation so as to respond to dynamic market changes. This article focuses towards the application of graph theory (GT) for conceptual modelling the agile system and to compute the dependencies among the individual agile enabler, criteria and attributes as a top-down approach. Using GT approach, digraphs were systematically constructed for agile enablers and variable permanent matrix values were computed for different scenarios and the relative importance of agility enablers were determined. The permanent values of ‘Management responsibility’ enabler and technology enabler are found to be 920 (minimum) and 3529?×?10¹⁴, respectively for the existing situation, whereas for the practically base case situation, it was found to be 1185 (minimum) and 5081.17?×?10¹⁴ (maximum), respectively. The Comprehensive Agility Index was found to be 1.3996?×?10⁴⁵, which can be even used to benchmark with other best-in-class agile organisations.     

Simulation in the design and operation of manufacturing systems: state of the art and new trends

As the industrial requirements change at a rapid pace due to the drastic evolution of technology, the necessity of quickly investigating potential system alternatives towards a more efficient manufacturing system design arises more intensely than ever. Manufacturing systems simulation has proven to be a powerful tool for designing and evaluating a manufacturing system due to its low cost, quick analysis, low risk and meaningful insight that it may provide, improving thus the understanding of the influence of each component. Simulation comprises an indispensable set of IT tools and methods for the successful implementation of digital manufacturing. It allows experimentation and validation of product, process, and system design and configuration. This paper investigates the major historical milestones in the evolution of manufacturing systems simulation technologies and examines recent industrial and research approaches in key fields of manufacturing. It describes how the urge towards digitalisation of manufacturing in the context of the 4th Industrial revolution has shaped simulation in the design and operation of manufacturing systems and reviews the new approaches that have arisen in the literature. Particular focus is given to technologies in the digitalised factories of the future that are gaining ground in industrial applications simulation, offering multiple advantages.     

A comprehensive approach to operation sequence similarity based part family formation in the reconfigurable manufacturing system

The industrial sector of the twenty-first century faces a highly volatile market in which manufacturing systems must be capable of responding rapidly to the market changes, while fully exploiting resources. The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a state of the art technology offering the exact functionality and capacity needed, which is built around a part family. The configuration of an RMS evolves over a period to justify the needs of upcoming part families. The foundation for the success of an RMS, therefore, lies in the recognition of appropriate sets of part families. In the present work the authors have developed a novel operation sequence based BMIM (bypassing moves and idle machines) similarity coefficient using longest common subsequence (LCS) and the minimum number of bypassing moves and the quantity of idle machines. The effectiveness of the developed similarity coefficient has been compared with the existing best similarity/dissimilarity coefficients available in the existing literature. An example set of parts has been classified using the developed similarity coefficient and average linkage hierarchical clustering algorithm. The developed approach can also be used very effectively for part family formation in the cellular manufacturing system.     

Challenges and trends in the allocation of the workforce in manufacturing shop floors

This paper presents a critical and focused review of definitions, challenges and developments of the workforce allocation system in manufacturing shop floors with a particular emphasis on response to changes and disturbances. The continuously changing requirements in production environments have been the driving force behind several stages of evolution experienced by management of workforce allocation. The paper includes an in-depth examination of the phenomena of changes and disturbances in the production shop floor. This is followed by an assessment of the readiness of workforce allocation systems to respond to such events with respect to both workforce perception and system architecture. Recent developments of the workforce allocation models suggest that the use of intelligent and distributed systems and techniques offer solutions that are responsive, flexible, and multi-criteria. To this end, an overview of a recent study in the application of the principles of holonic manufacturing systems, as an example of intelligent system approach to develop a flexible workforce allocation model, is presented.     

Strategic alliance formation and the effects on the performance of manufacturing enterprises from supply chain perspective

This study examines the antecedents of strategic alliance formation in manufacturing firms in China, the alliance effect on innovation capability and dyadic quality performance, and how these two organisational capabilities are related to the supply chain performance of Chinese manufacturing enterprises in Shanghai. We perform a series of statistical techniques including logistic regression analysis, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis for assessing the hypothesised relationships. Our findings indicate that relational stability and effective communication are significant antecedent factors influencing strategic alliance formation among Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Such alliance formation is found to benefit innovation capability and dyadic quality performance, which are significant contributors to the supply chain performance of Chinese manufacturers. We provide important theoretical and practical implications on these antecedents and consequences of strategic alliance formation leading to supply chain performance in the Chinese manufacturing context.