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New Production Concepts for the Process Industry Require Modular Logistics Solutions

“…Given the trend toward smaller batch and lot sizes and the inadequate flexibility that modern plant designs offer in terms of capacity utilization, it is not unusual for world-scale plants to be found running at less than full capacity. This phenomenon is particularly common among highly automated plants [5], such as those used in the process industry.…”

Product Variety and Variety in Production

“…Although variety traditionally concerns products through the eyeglasses of marketing, engineering, and distribution, variety in production exist too. Several concepts akin to variety in production have been proposed: such as Cellular Manufacturing (CM) (Choobineh, 1988), Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) (Browne et al, 1984;ElMaraghy, 2005), Modular Production Systems (MPS) (Rogers and Bottaci, 1997), Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) (Koren et al, 1999;Koren et al, 2016), Agile Manufacturing Systems (AMS) (Gunasekaran, 1999), Generic-Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations (GBOMO) (Jiao et al, 2000), process platforms (Jiao et al, 2007a), manufacturing platforms (Michaelis and Johannesson, 2011). Based on the definition of product platforms by Robertson and Ulrich (1998), a platform of technical systems can be defined as a collection of assets that are shared and reused among a set of technical systems.…”

“…(Baldwin and Clark, 1997). Modularization has been a fundamental concept of product family design, product platform development, as well as similar concepts in production such as the Modular Production Systems (MPS) (Rogers and Bottaci, 1997) and the Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) (Koren et al, 1999). During the production, the modularity of the MPS and the RMS is pivotal to allow quick changeover to serve the production fulfillment of many different product variants among a product variety, i.e.…”

Assessment of Manufacturing Processes for Automated Timber-Based Panelised Prefabrication

“…Currently, many companies utilise and adopt conventional manual-based construction techniques for timber-based prefabricated manufacturing [1]. However, timber-based prefabricated panels are an increasingly utilised system in the construction industry and with it, the automated technologies which support them are currently being strongly developed and adopted in replacement of conventional methods [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The manufacturing of prefabricated timber panel walls is an increasingly developing field, where a combination of automated and manual processes are utilised to assemble an efficient production line [11,12].…”