Deriving a systematic approach to changeable manufacturing system design

It has long been argued that Factories are long life and complex products. The complexity of designing factories, and their underlying manufacturing systems, is further amplified when dealing with continuously changing customer demands. At the same time, due to research fragmentation, little if any scientific explanations are available supporting and exploiting the paradigm that "factories are products". In order to address this weakness, this paper presents research results arising from a comparative analysis of systematic "product design" and "manufacturing system design" approaches. The contribution emerging from this research is an integrated systematic design approach to changeable manufacturing systems, based on scientific concepts founded upon product design theories, and is explained through a case study in the paper. This research is part of collaboration between the CERU University of Malta and IAO Fraunhofer aimed at developing a digital decision support tool for planning changeable manufacturing systems.peer-reviewe

Configuration of robust manufacturing systems

Considering the increasing turbulence in the markets, many companies are faced with the task of responding to changes in customer demand in a flexible and timely manner. A variety of current research projects in terms of configuration of production systems deals with the increasing flexibility of several elements of a production system or the entire system, to meet the need for flexible responses. Furthermore, there is the avoidance or reduction of any kind of waste, including the creation of standards for the information and material flow processes at the heart of the company's efforts. Against this background, also organisationally robust processes are increasingly becoming the focus of operational actors. This paper points out the possibilities of influencing production systems and what characteristics exist regarding the requirement of structural changes. In this context, production control by defined loops and checking structural performance are indicators relevant to the focus of following considerations

Understanding the relationship between design margins and trade-offs

To achieve an objective designers often need to make trade-offs between multiple parameters. In incremental design or during the design process an additional objective is often to minimise the changes they need to make to meet the objective. This is in particular an issue for systems with product platforms, over individual components are over-designed. This paper argues that designers can think about this problem in terms of the margins on the objective parameters as well as the parameters that are traded-off. This is illustrated with the case study of an engineering cooling system

LIFECYCLE BASED AUDIT PROCESS FOR DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS

The paper wishes to present the audit process as part of a distributed framework in which a new set of metrics are built. The requirements for an audit process are described and on each of the lifecycle stages, the audit process is emphasized. The existing quality characteristics models from the literature are analyzed based on which a new set of metrics are built for sustaining the overall audit process.audit process, distributed applications, metrics and lifecycle

Changeable Manufacturing on the Network Level

AbstractAgility in the sense of changeability on the manufacturing network level, and here especially the business perspective, has received less attention than the other dimensions of changeability on the lower production levels, as well as in relation to the technological perspective. The present paper aims to enrich the concept of agility in the aforementioned sense, taking strategic management concepts into account that have so far received less attention in relation to changeability. Namely, we consider the concepts of lead factory, capacity pooling and allying, operational flexibility, and the concept of combining products, services and software as fruitful enrichments of the umbrella concept changeability. In so doing, we highlight interdependencies between agility and the analyzed concepts as well as the other changeability dimensions on the lower production level of factories or sites. On this basis, we formulate six hypotheses in consideration of the presented theoretical derivations. Hence, the methodological approach of our research is conceptual and hypothesis generating. Our work is supposed to build the basis for continuative conceptual and empirical research on agility

Characteristics of changeable systems across value chains

Engineering changes (ECs) are inevitable for businesses due to increasing innovation, shorter lifecycles, technology and process improvements and cost reduction initiatives. The ECs could propagate and cause further changes due to existing system dependencies, which can be challenging. Hence, change management (CM) is a relevant discipline, which aims to reduce the impact of changes. EC assessment methods form the basis of CM that support in assessing system dependencies and the impact of changes. However, there is limited understanding of which factors influence the change-ability across value chains (VCs). This research adopted a VC approach to EC assessment. Dependencies in products and processes were captured, followed by the risk (i.e. likelihood x impact) assessment of ECs using change prediction method (CPM). Four case studies were conducted from two industries (automotive, furniture) to identify design (product) and manufacturing (process) elements with high risk to be affected by ECs. Based on the case results, characteristics were identified that influence change-ability across VC. This contributed to the CM domain while businesses could also use the results to assess ECs across VC, and improve the design of products and processes by increasing their changeability across VC e.g. by proactive decoupling or reactive handling of system dependencies.Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), UK under Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI

Potential and limitations of plant virus epidemiology: lessons from the Potato virus Y pathosystem

Abstract Plant virus epidemiology provides powerful tools to investigate key factors that contribute to virus epidemics in agricultural crops. When successful, epidemiological approaches help to guide decisions regarding plant protection strategies. A recent example is epidemiological research on Potato virus Y (PVY) in Finnish seed potato production; this study led to the dentification of the main PVY vector species and helped to determine the timing of virus transmission. However, pathosystems rarely allow research to produce such clear-cut results. In fact, the notorious complexity of plant virus pathosystems, with multiple interactions between virus, vector, plant and environment, makes them often impenetrable even for advanced epidemiological models. This dynamic complexity questions the universal validity of employing epidemiological models that attempt to single out key factors in plant virus epidemics. Therefore, a complementary approach is needed that acknowledges the partly indeterministic nature of complex and evolving pathosystems. Such an approach is the use of diversity, imploying functionally complementary elements that can jointly buffer against environmental changes. I argue that for a wider range of plant production problems, the strategy of combining mechanistic and diversity-based approaches will provide potent and sustainable solutions. In addition, to translate insights from plant virus epidemiology into practice, improvements need to be made in knowledge transfer, both within the scientific community and between researchers and practitioners. Finally, moving towards more appropriate virus control strategies is only possible if economic interests of all stakeholders are in line with changing current practices

The State-of-the-Art and Prospects of Learning Factories

AbstractChangeability of manufacturing systems is an important enabler for offering large variety of competitive products to satisfy customers’ requirements. Learning factories, as teaching and research environments, can play a key role in developing new solutions for changeability, transferring them to the industry and using them in educating engineers. The results of a survey of existing learning factories and their characteristics are presented. Their use in research, teaching and industrial projects is analyzed. A novel scheme to classify those systems with regard to their design, products and their changeability characteristics is outlined. Conclusions about the future of learning factories are drawn

A CHANGEABILITY APPROACH FOR PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND DECISION SUPPORT ON THE SHOP FLOOR

This document contains an approach to map the changeability possibilities of machine tools used on the shop floor onto line management understandable business processes. The identified gap is a lack of information transparency on the line management level due to constraints, complexity and speed of a production process on the shop floor. Especially medium-sized enterprises in the supplier sector are forced to operate under strong time restrictions which are predetermined by original equipment manufacturers. Due to competitors and shareholders these enterprises often use a lean management approach which allows them on the one hand to produce under low costs but on the other hand handicaps them to react on disruptive events on the shop floor. We argue that nowadays industrial small and medium sized industrial enterprises have to have a fast reaction on changes and events. It is seen by the authors that changeability of production processes is an essential success factor in this globalized world. Because of the fact that more and more responsibility is handed over to the lower line management, the information support has to be improved in order to make them capable for choosing the best decision. In this paper a concept is shown how the lower management can reallocate production process steps in order to avoid penalty costs if a just in time production is requested by an original equipment manufacturer. To be able to do this, an information support concept for the lower management has to be established within the company to meet the requirements for choosing the best fitting reaction to a disruptive event. The future research concept is described after the analysis of an example production process scenario which is illustrated within this paper