Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

Review layouts, flows, and movements of raw materials in the warehouse and production

Treball desenvolupat en el marc del programa "European Project Semester".Incorporation of new raw materials in the existing warehouse and elimination of intermediate buffers for production storage, to locate new machinery. By eliminating Kanban’s factory of raw materials of large consumption or use, ensure the efficiency of the factory during 3 production shifts and 2 warehouse shifts (ensure raw material for production during the night shift). AkzoNobel, a Dutch multinational with 30 manufacturing plants and 125 warehouses located across Europe, is the subject of this project. The focus will be on the Vilafranca del Pendès warehouse, which currently employs manual tools in certain manufacturing processes. The company has encountered limitations in its production line and requires significant changes to enhance its capacity. The project aims to improve the company through four fundamental concepts: efficiency, sustainability, competitiveness, and effectiveness. These concepts are closely associated with the main objective of this project, which can also be defined as: Increasing efficiency by automating production. Implementing automation can be a crucial step toward achieving better outcomes. By using automated multi-stations instead of relying on human resources only, labor costs and risks can be minimized and at the same time achieve much higher production outputs. This reduction in costs and human resource requirements also opens up new opportunities for future development within the company. To remain competitive in the industry, it is essential to make changes that will benefit the future of the company. As this famous naval saying by John Paul Jones, “Those Who Do Not Risk Cannot Win”. The purpose of this report is to showcase the AkzoNobel team’s work during the first part of the EPS on automating production. The report starts with an overview of the company’s background, their state of the art to see what they have achieved, benchmarking with other companies, the EPS program, our team, and the project roadmap. Followed by the project’s scope, including details on the company’s current situation, ongoing projects, their drawbacks, project objectives, and potential challenges. Additionally, the report provides a concise description of the paintfilling process and the characteristics of the barrels used. The report then presents four solutions, outlining their pros and cons, and compares one of our proposed solutions with AkzoNobel’s. After presenting these four solutions, the focus will be put on the chosen solution by AkzoNobel by presenting the final layout, detailing some safety protocols, environmental impact, and the forecasted budget. Finally, the report concludes with a summary of our future plans for the final report, conclusions, and appendices detailing the tools that were used to carry out this project.Incomin

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Efficient State Update Exchange in a CPS Environment for Linked Data-based Digital Twins

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of reducing the number of messages needed to exchange state updates between the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) components that integrate with the rest of the CPS through Digital Twins in order to maintain uniform communication interface and carry out their tasks correctly and safely. The main contribution is a proposed architecture and the discussion of its suitability to support correct execution of complex tasks across the CPS. A new State Event Filtering component is presented to provide event-based communication among Digital Twins that are based on the Linked Data principles while keeping the fan-out limited to ensure the scalability of the architecture

Logistics 4.0 in warehousing: a conceptual framework of influencing factors, benefits and barriers

Purpose: In the last decade, the Industry 4.0 paradigm had started to rapidly expand to the logistics domain. However, Logistics 4.0 is still in an early adoption stage: some areas such as warehousing are still exploring its applicability, and the technological implementation of this paradigm can become fuzzy. This paper addresses this gap by examining the relationship among influencing factors, barriers, and benefits of Logistics 4.0 technologies in warehousing contexts. Design/methodology/approach: Starting from a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach with 56 examined documents published in scientific journals or conference proceedings, a conceptual framework for Logistics 4.0 in warehousing is proposed. The framework encompasses multiple aspects related to the potential adopter’s decision-making process. Findings: Influencing factors toward adoption, achievable benefits, and possible hurdles or criticalities have been extensively analyzed and structured into a consistent picture. Company’s digital awareness and readiness result in a major influencing factor, whereas barriers and criticalities are mostly technological, safety and security, and economic in nature. Warehousing process optimization is the key benefit identified. Originality/value: This paper addresses a major gap since most of the research has focused on specific facets, or adopted the technology providers’ perspective, whereas little has been explored in warehousing from the adopters’ view. The main novelty and value lie in providing both academics and practitioners with a thorough view of multiple facets to be considered when approaching Logistics 4.0 in logistics facilities

Smart Manufacturing

This book is a collection of 11 articles that are published in the corresponding Machines Special Issue “Smart Manufacturing”. It represents the quality, breadth and depth of the most updated study in smart manufacturing (SM); in particular, digital technologies are deployed to enhance system smartness by (1) empowering physical resources in production, (2) utilizing virtual and dynamic assets over the Internet to expand system capabilities, (3) supporting data-driven decision-making activities at various domains and levels of businesses, or (4) reconfiguring systems to adapt to changes and uncertainties. System smartness can be evaluated by one or a combination of performance metrics such as degree of automation, cost-effectiveness, leanness, robustness, flexibility, adaptability, sustainability, and resilience. This book features, firstly, the concepts digital triad (DT-II) and Internet of digital triad things (IoDTT), proposed to deal with the complexity, dynamics, and scalability of complex systems simultaneously. This book also features a comprehensive survey of the applications of digital technologies in space instruments; a systematic literature search method is used to investigate the impact of product design and innovation on the development of space instruments. In addition, the survey provides important information and critical considerations for using cutting edge digital technologies in designing and manufacturing space instruments

INSPIRE Newsletter Spring 2022

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/inspire-newsletters/1010/thumbnail.jp

On Specifying for Trustworthiness

As autonomous systems (AS) increasingly become part of our daily lives, ensuring their trustworthiness is crucial. In order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of an AS, we first need to specify what is required for an AS to be considered trustworthy. This roadmap paper identifies key challenges for specifying for trustworthiness in AS, as identified during the "Specifying for Trustworthiness" workshop held as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme. We look across a range of AS domains with consideration of the resilience, trust, functionality, verifiability, security, and governance and regulation of AS and identify some of the key specification challenges in these domains. We then highlight the intellectual challenges that are involved with specifying for trustworthiness in AS that cut across domains and are exacerbated by the inherent uncertainty involved with the environments in which AS need to operate.Comment: Accepted version of paper. 13 pages, 1 table, 1 figur