Different Perspectives of a Factory of the Future: An Overview

Digitalfactory,andCloudManufacturingaretwoapproaches that aim at addressing the Factory of the Future, i.e., to provide digital support to manufacturing factories. They find their roots in two different geographical areas, respectively Europe and China, and therefore presents some differences as well as the same goal of building the factory of the future. In this paper, we present both the digital factory and the cloud manufacturing approaches and discuss their differences

Enhancing the Competitiveness of the European Construction Industry in the Digital Economy

Funding bodies in general, and the European Commission in particular, have for over a decade funded project centred Research and Technology Development (RTD) efforts. While these have traditionally operated in isolation with little co-operation and cross-fertilization of results, a crucial requirement has emerged, following the latest advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to have a more concerted and co-ordinated action aiming at a better integration, standardisation, dissemination and exploitation of the results from these projects across the European regions and countries. This has been clearly identified as a key requirement within the European Information Society and Technology (IST) Programme. In that respect, based on the promising results and achievements realized by the leading Construction IT community in Europe, a cluster project involving six IST funded projects has been set-up in order to achieve a better integration of research results in the area. This project, ICCI (IST-2001-33022), is targeting a specific sector: the Construction industry, and is addressing a wide spectrum of issues ranging from ICT implementation and deployment to organizational, social, and legal aspects. The paper gives (1) a background description of the context in which ICCI operates, (2) its aims and objectives, (3) the research results achieved to date by its partners within their respective IST project, and (4) a road map identifying areas of collaboration and expected impacts in the European Construction digital economy

Business strategy driven IT systems for engineer-to-order and make-to-order manufacturing enterprises

This thesis reports research into the specification and implementation of an Information Technology (IT) Route Map. The purpose of the Route Map is to enable rapid design and deployment of IT solutions capable of semi-automating business processes in a manufacturing enterprise. The Map helps structure transition processes involved in “identification of key business strategies and design of business processes” and “choice of enterprise systems and supporting implementation techniques”. Common limitations of current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are observed and incorporated as Route Map implications and constraints. Scope of investigation is targeted at Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) that employ Engineer-To-Order (ETO) and Make-To-Order (MTO) business processes. However, a feature of the Route Map is that it takes into account contemporary business concerns related to “globalisation”, “mergers and acquisitions” and “typical resource constraint problems of SMEs”. In the course of the research a “Business Strategy Driven IT System Concept” was conceived and examined. The main purpose of this concept is to promote the development of agile and innovative business activity in SMEs. The Road Map encourages strategy driven solutions to be (a) specified based on the use of emerging enterprise engineering theories and (b) implemented and changed using componentbased systems design and composition techniques. Part-evaluation of the applicability and capabilities of the Road Map has been carried out by conducting industrial survey and case study work. This assesses requirements of real industrial problems and solutions. The evaluation work has also been enabled by conducting a pilot implementation of the thesis concepts at the premises of a partner SME

Sustainability incubators : A coordinated collaborative approach towards sustainable manufacturing amongst small and medium-sized enterprises

Part of: Seliger, Günther (Ed.): Innovative solutions : proceedings / 11th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing, Berlin, Germany, 23rd - 25th September, 2013. - Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2013. - ISBN 978-3-7983-2609-5 (online). - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:83-opus4-40276. - pp. 19–24.Small and medium-sized enterprises constitute a major share of the manufacturing sector in many countries and are known for their dynamic structure and innovative strength. Despite the potential for sustainability performance the economic impact of environmental regulations may impede many business ventures. Business incubators foster entrepreneurship by offering infrastructural facilities and legal support. The central management of environmental impact reduction and cross-application technologies can in some cases be profitable. The entrepreneurial framework may initiate progress towards the application of sustainability principles. Benchmarking as a powerful management tool can induce best practice transfer and the conceivable collaborations may generate eco-innovations, social and creatively beneficial environments as well as economic advantages. The induced performance measurement, comparison and exchange of experiences is directed towards collective sustainability performance

Engineering methods and tools for cyber–physical automation systems

Much has been published about potential benefits of the adoption of cyber–physical systems (CPSs) in manufacturing industry. However, less has been said about how such automation systems might be effectively configured and supported through their lifecycles and how application modeling, visualization, and reuse of such systems might be best achieved. It is vitally important to be able to incorporate support for engineering best practice while at the same time exploiting the potential that CPS has to offer in an automation systems setting. This paper considers the industrial context for the engineering of CPS. It reviews engineering approaches that have been proposed or adopted to date including Industry 4.0 and provides examples of engineering methods and tools that are currently available. The paper then focuses on the CPS engineering toolset being developed by the Automation Systems Group (ASG) in the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K. and explains via an industrial case study how such a component-based engineering toolset can support an integrated approach to the virtual and physical engineering of automation systems through their lifecycle via a method that enables multiple vendors' equipment to be effectively integrated and provides support for the specification, validation, and use of such systems across the supply chain, e.g., between end users and system integrators

Production process stability - Core assumption of INDUSTRY 4.0 concept

Today's industrial enterprises are confronted by implementation of INDUSTRY 4.0 concept with basic problem - stabilised manufacturing and supporting processes. Through this phenomenon of stabilisation, they will achieve positive digital management of both processes and continuously throughput. There is required structural stability of horizontal (business) and vertical (digitized) manufacturing processes, supported through digitalised technologies of INDUSTRY 4.0 concept. Results presented in this paper based on the research results and survey realised in more industrial companies. Following will described basic model for structural process stabilisation in manufacturing environment. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

Toward a Multi-disciplinary Business Architecture Reference Model for SMEs

Competing in a global, open and dynamic ecosystem of firms, SMEs require a strategic management tool to manage co-evolution with dynamic environments. To sustain their competitive advantages, SMEs must enhance the capacity of orchestrating and integrating resources/capabilities to adopt/shape their chosen ecosystem and meet the emergent market needs. Drawing from existing literature and preliminary interviews it has been found that SMEs need a simple but holistically comprehensive strategic management tool to help the executives implement entrepreneurial practices that have the capacity to quickly identify new resource configuration to align with the changing environments. In particular we develop a multi-disciplinary Business Architecture Reference Model (BARM) for SMEs to help SMEs create value in an open and dynamic ecosystem. Derived from SMEs’ internal and external strategic requirements, we revisit conceptual model for the SME BARM by integrating diverse but interrelated disciplines including; IS, strategic management, organization, architecture and service sciences. Theoretically grounded from these diverse disciplines, the BARM provides SMEs with a new holistic approach to orchestrate their socio-technical resources/capabilities and manage their co-evolution within the dynamic ecosystem. The proposed BARM for SMEs comprises architectural components and metamodel that helps SMEs plan, articulate and execute their business strategies, resulting in a business-aligned configuration of resources to attain evolutionary fitness with the competitive environments. By incorporating organisation and strategic management theories in the BARM conceptual model, the paper also contributes to the theoretical foundation of architecture sci-ence – accentuating the socio-technical (capability-based) nature of architecture. The preliminary BARM’s efficacy and usability has been validated through interviews with industry experts and SME executives