Knowledge-enriched shop floor control in end-of-life business

Abstract

Ever-stricter environmental legislation over the past decade has led to the emergence of the end-of-life (EOL) industrial sector, e.g. remanufacturing of products, recycling of material and the recovery of energy. Due to uncertainties over returned product quantities, product quality and product diversity, production planning and control in EOL activities is quite different from those in the forward supply chain. In fact, those uncertainties can be diminished by enhancing the exploitation of the related information generated throughout the product lifecycle. Product lifecycle management provides an opportunity to access and share the distributed information generally available in the product lifecycle, while agent-based systems have been found to be effective tools in such large, uncertain environments. In this article, a product lifecycle information system that deploys agents is introduced into a typical EOL shop floor control system to provide lifecycle information for the returned product for decision-making. Supported by radio frequency identification technology, the product itself controls processes aggressively and autonomously in a system designed to minimise uncertainty. A case study of how the system supports shop floor planning and control in a plastics recycling plant is described at the end of the article.

Insights on Multi-Agent Systems Applications for Supply Chain Management

“…All these features are well suited for MAS modelling, allowing for analyzing the complexities of this new paradigm and studying the impact of the reverse flow of used products (and its associated processes to restore value) on the classic forward flow of new products. This is still an emerging area of research, and there are only a few studies using MAS [38,[94][95][96][97][98].…”

Feedback from Remanufacturing: Its Unexploited Potential to Improve Future Product Design

“…They use the term Closed-Loop Product Information (CLPI) for tracking and feedback using wireless technology, thus seamlessly transforming product life cycle information into knowledge. Likewise, Cao et al [26] highlighted the role of Product Life cycle Management (PLM) as a promising approach for integrating product information throughout the product life cycle. They proposed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology as a means of contributing to PLM by providing more precise feed-forward information such as disassembly instructions, and more valuable feedback from the entire product life cycle.…”

An improved multi-objective genetic algorithm for heterogeneous coverage RFID network planning

“…RFID networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in various applications, e.g. ubiquitous learning (Chen and Huang 2012;Chen and Lin 2014), wireless manufacturing (Brintrup, Ranasinghe, and McFarlane 2010;Huang, Williams, and Zheng 2011), warehousing operation (Pacciarelli, D'Ariano, and Scotto 2011), production schedule (Pacciarelli and D'Ariano 2012) and product life cycle management (Cao et al 2009(Cao et al , 2010.…”

“…RFID networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in various applications, e.g. ubiquitous learning (Chen and Huang 2012; Chen and Lin 2014), wireless manufacturing (Brintrup, Ranasinghe, and McFarlane 2010; Huang, Williams, and Zheng 2011), warehousing operation (Pacciarelli, D'Ariano, and Scotto 2011), production schedule (Pacciarelli and D'Ariano 2012) and product life cycle management (Cao et al 2009(Cao et al , 2010.Owing to the limited effective tag-reader communication distance (e.g. 3-5 m for UHF RFID devices), deploying an RFID application in a large field often requires a great number of readers, which makes it expensive.…”