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In manufacturing industry, downtimes have been considered as major impact factors of production performance. However, the real impacts of downtime events and relationships between downtimes and system performance and bottlenecks are not as trivial as it appears. To improve the system performance in real-time and to properly allocate limited resources/efforts to different stations, it is necessary to quantify the impact of each station downtime event on the production throughput of the whole transfer line. A complete characterization of the impact requires a careful investigation of the transients of the line dynamics disturbed by the downtime event. We study in this paper the impact of downtime events on the performance of inhomogeneous serial transfer lines. Our mathematical analysis suggests that the impact of any isolated downtime event is only apparent in the relatively long run when the duration exceeds a certain threshold called opportunity window. We also study the bottleneck phenomenon and its relationship with downtimes and opportunity window. The results are applicable to real-time production control, opportunistic maintenance scheduling, personnel staffing, and downtime cost estimation.

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.

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Environmental sustainability information in the manufacturing industry is not easily shared between stages in the product lifecycle. In particular, reliable manufacturing-related information for assessing the sustainability of a product is often unavailable at the design stage. Instead, designers rely on aggregated, often outdated information or make decisions by analogy (e.g., a similar manufacturing process for a similar product yielded X and Y results). However, smart manufacturing and the Internet of Things have potential to bridge the gap between design and manufacturing through data and knowledge sharing. This paper analyzes environmental sustainability assessment methods to enable more accurate decisions earlier in design. The techniques and methods are categorized based on the stage they apply to in the product lifecycle, as described by the Systems Integration of Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) reference architecture. Furthermore, opportunities for aligning standard data representation to promote sustainability assessment during design are identified.

Timely performance of preventive maintenance (PM) tasks is a critical element of manufacturing systems. Since the majority of PM tasks requires that equipment be stopped, these tasks can generally only be performed during nonproduction shifts, breaks, or other scheduled downtime. Thus, there is a trade-off between time dedicated to production and time available for preventive maintenance. One approach to mitigate this trade-off is to perform maintenance during scheduled production time by strategically shutting down equipment for short time periods. This research developed a systematic method on when to shut down equipment to do maintenance in an automotive assembly environment. It is called maintenance opportunity. The method incorporated real-time information about production and machine failure conditions. A simulation-based algorithm is developed by utilizing the buffer contents as well as machine starvation and congestion to obtain maintenance opportunities during production time.