Successful manufacturing system designs must be capable of satisfying the strategic objectives of a company. There exist numerous tools to design manufacturing systems. Most frameworks, however, do not separate objectives from means. As a result, it is difficult to understand the interactions among different design objectives and solutions and to communicate these interactions. The research described in this paper develops an approach to help manufacturing system designers: (1) clearly separate objectives from the means of achievement, (2) relate low-level activities and decisions to high-level goals and requirements, (3) understand the interrelationships among the different elements of a system design, and (4) effectively communicate this information across a manufacturing organization. This research does so by describing a manufacturing system design decomposition (MSDD). The MSDD enables a firm to simultaneously achieve cost, quality, delivery responsiveness to the customer and flexibility objectives. The application section illustrates how the MSDD can be applied in conjunction with existing procedural manufacturing engineering.
Today's manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly complex, dynamic and connected. The factory operation faces challenges of highly nonlinear and stochastic activity due to the countless uncertainties and interdependencies that exist. Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Machine Learning (ML) have shown great potential to transform the manufacturing domain through advanced analytics tools for processing the vast amounts of manufacturing data generated, known as Big Data. The focus of this paper is threefold: (1) Review the State-of-the-Art applications of AI to representative manufacturing problems, (2) Provide a systematic view for analyzing data and process dependencies at multiple levels that AI must comprehend, and (3) Identify challenges and opportunities to not only further leverage AI for manufacturing, but also influence the future development of AI to better meet the needs of manufacturing. To satisfy these objectives, the paper adopts the hierarchical organization widely practiced in manufacturing plants in examining the interdependencies from the overall system level to the more detailed granular level of incoming material process streams. In doing so, the paper considers a wide range of topics from throughput and quality, supervisory control in human robotic collaboration, process monitoring, diagnosis and prognosis, finally to advances in materials engineering to achieve desired material property in process modeling and control.
Control of production operations is considered as one of the most economical methods to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing systems. This paper investigates energy consumption reduction in production systems through effective scheduling of machine startup and shutdown. Specifically, we consider serial production lines with finite buffers and machines having Bernoulli reliability model. This machine reliability model is applicable in production situations, where the downtime is relatively short and comparable to machine cycle time (e.g., automotive paint shops and general assembly). In this paper, using transient analysis of the systems at hand, an analytical performance evaluation technique is developed for Bernoulli serial lines with time-dependent machine efficiencies. In addition, tradeoff between productivity and energyefficiency in production systems is discussed and the energy-efficient production problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem. The effects and practical implications of operations schedule are demonstrated using a numerical study on automotive paint shop operations.Note to Practitioners-This paper develops an effective analytical tool to evaluate the performance of production systems with time-varying parameters of machine reliability. Using this tool, production engineers and managers can predict the performance of the production systems in real-time with high accuracy. In addition, based on this tool, production operators can determine the machine startup and shutdown schedule based on the current status of the line and production requirement. Numerical experiments show that significant energy savings can be obtained by applying effective machine operations schedule.
As manufacturers face the challenges of increasing global competition and energy saving requirements, it is imperative to seek out opportunities to reduce energy waste and overall cost. In this paper, a novel data-driven stochastic manufacturing system modeling method is proposed to identify and predict energy saving opportunities and their impact on production. A real-time distributed feedback production control policy, which integrates the current and predicted system performance, is established to improve the overall profit and energy efficiency. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control policy.
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