Augmenting the distribution of goods from warehouses in dynamic demand environments using intelligent agents

Warehouses are being impacted by increasing e-commerce and omni-channel commerce. Future innovation may predominantly involve automation but many warehouses remain manually operated. The golden rule of material handling is smooth product flow, but there are day-to-day operational issues that occur in the warehouse that can impact this and order fulfilment. Standard operational process is paramount to warehouse operational control but inflexible processes don’t allow for a dynamic response to real-time operational constraints. The growth of IoT sensor and data analytics technology provide new opportunities for designing warehouse management systems that detect and reorganise around real-time constraints to mitigate the impact of day-to-day warehouse operational issues. This paper presents an intelligent agent framework for basic warehouse management systems that is distributed, is structured around operational constraints and includes the human operator at operational and decision support levels. An agent based simulation was built to demonstrate the viability of the framework

A formal validation approach for holonic control system specifications

The holonic manufacturing paradigm allows a new approach to the emergent requirements faced by the manufacturing world, through the concepts of modularity, decentralisation, autonomy, re-use of control software components. The formal modelling and validation of the structural and behavioural specifications of holonic control systems assumes a critical role. This paper discusses the formal validation of the Petri Net models designed to represent the behaviour and specifications of the holon classes defined at ADACOR architecture

A reference model for information specification for metalworking SMEs

The work reported in this thesis offers a novel basis for the realisation of specifications for information requirements to meet the distinct operational requirements of metalworking SMEs. This has been achieved through the development of a reference SME enterprise model based on fundamental ideas of the holon and fractal factory concepts. The novel concept of a node holon is introduced, which allows the representation of the human dominated interactions in a company based on the fundamental concepts of the holon. This offers a competitive alternative to the methods for enterprise modelling and information specification which are based solely around business processes and procedural rules. A new representation for the organisation of the SME has been based on identifying the major zones of activity within the enterprise, which is seen to provide a more appropriate representation for companies whose basis for operation is informally structured. Two classes of zones have been identified, these are the business support zone and manufacturing zone. The relationship between a top down description of the enterprise as zones and the complementary bottoms up modelling of the enterprise based on concepts of the node holon are described in detail. A critical study of two candidate modelling architectures, namely CIN40SA and ARIS will show the applicability of the individual architectures for the task information specification. The constituents of the SMEE enterprise reference model is placed within the context of contemporary enterprise modelling practice by mapping against one of the architectures. This will demonstrate how the architectures can readily accommodate new modelling approaches whilst retaining their major advantages, thereby increasing their applicability and potential uptake. The reference SME enterprise model has been readily applied in the study of an SME, where a representation of the company has been achieved solely on the current organisation of its business support and manufacturing activities. The holonic aspects of the enterprise have also been successfully modelled. This process is supported by a CASE tool which has it constructs underpinned by the reference SME enterprise model

Simulation for Product Driven Systems

Due to globalisation, companies have to become more and more agile in order to face demand fluctuations and growing customisation needs. Indeed, the mass production market moves to a mass customization one, which could be defined as the production of a wide variety of end products at a low unit cost. During last years, many efforts have been done in order to improve operating system reactivity (with the Flexible Manufacturing initiative for example), but the manufacturing decision process did not really change, and then doesn't enable to fully make the most of these new operating system skills. Facing these new trends, a lot of new research works are focusing on identification technologies, like Auto-ID, biometry or vision ones. Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) represents a quick and safe way to track products, opening the way of linking informational and physical flows, and providing an accurate, real time vision of the shop floor. These new technologies appear like a catalyst to change the fifty years old way of controlling production through traditional MRP² systems

An agile and adaptive holonic architecture for manufacturing control

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. 2004. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Port

Collaborative Systems, Operation and Task of the Manufacturing Execution Systems in the 21st Century Industry

Until the first two decades of the 21st century, as part of the Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP), the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and related systems have undergone development in both complexity and efficiency. In the field of production technology, there are many sources of work nowadays to get a detailed picture of the solutions offered by MES. The purpose of this article is to give a comprehensive overview of the MES solutions that currently used in industry. In addition to the general structure of the systems and Holonic MES are briefly described. Special attencion is paid to various collaborative systems that complement the MES. The additional manufacturing tools for MES is also described shematically in this article

Supply chains’ robustness: Challenges and opportunities

Nowadays robustness of supply chains, i.e. their ability to cope with external and internal disruptions and disturbances, gains more and more importance. The paper puts the topic into a broader scope, i.e. it also highlights the concept of robustness in other disciplines (especially in biology) and at the different levels of manufacturing. The main risks of supply chain operations together with some fundamental risk mitigation strategies are summarized. Measures of structural and operational robustness of supply chains are introduced, and the concept of a framework for evaluating supply chains robustness, complexity and efficiency is described in short. Challenges and opportunities related to the increase of robustness are outlined in the paper, with special emphasis on those which arise in the cyber-physical era

Introducing the Central Backup Cellular Manufacturing System (CBCMS)

In this paper, we present a new layout arrangement that we call the central backup cellular manufacturing systems (CBCMS). The CBCMS organization is inspired by the concept of the remainder cell in Group technology (GT) systems where the idea is to allocate products that are not easily partitioned in the parts-machine incidence matrix to the remainder cell through a cell that contains all process capabilities. The fractal cell layout can be thought of as replications of the remainder cell in the GT concept. The GT layout represents an efficient approach under certain static conditions, while the fractal layout represents a flexible approach that better deals with uncertainties. The objective of this paper is to explore how a designer can manage variability arising from internal and external disturbances in manufacturing systems while designing a layout and in doing so, to show that the CBCMS provides a framework to unify GT and fractal layouts