Manufacturing system and enterprise management for Industry 4.0: Guest editorial

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) represents a significant step in the processes transformation in practically every industry, where the smart concept emerges in autonomous decisions and cyber-physical systems based production systems [1]. The role played by the usually referred technological pillars of I4.0 (such as internet of things (IoT), horizontal and vertical system integration, simulation, autonomous robots, big data and analytics, augmented reality, additive manufacturing, cloud computing and cybersecurity), based on technological advancements (mainly Information and Communications Technology (ICT)), in adhering to I4.0, are well known by the industry and academia (attending the huge number of research papers available), and have being implemented with more or less success. Notwithstanding the significant expected opportunities and impact of the fourth industrial revolution identified by researchers, experts are not convinced that the changes will be as significant as forecasted [2 - 4]. According to [5], only rare and recent attempts to understand the critical success factors of I4.0 implementation in manufacturing companies can be found in literature. A few recent studies reviewed in [5], point out that some of the critical factors are related to the management for I4.0. Cumulatively, the research in the field of management for I4.0, is still scarce, compared with the research on technologies for I4.0. The title of this Special Issue “Manufacturing System and Enterprise Management for Industry 4.0” is aligned with that concern and its content should be seen as a contribution to overcome management deficit problem of I4.0 implementation success. Nowadays, the challenges are related to the way how I4.0 is implemented and managed, in order to achieve the desired outcomes, economic, environmental, and social.First, our acknowledgments and greatest thanks go to Professor Bosko Rasuo, Editor-in-Chief of the FME Transactions, for his highest support and professionalism and, more importantly, his highest collaboration, understanding and patience during the development of this Special Issue. Next, our acknowledgments go to the authors, for their contributions and collaboration, and to the reviewers, for their great effort during the review process and for the suggestions they provided to the authors. Acknowledgments go also to our institutions, University of Minho and Polytechnic of Porto, and to the Research centres within which this project on this Special Issue has been developed, namely to ALGORITMI Research Center of the University of Minho and INESC TEC - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science. The guest editors want to acknowledge as well that this work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty two papers which were presented on the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY ’08 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments, held in Ofir, Portugal, from 25th to 27th of June, 2008. The main motive of the meeting was the growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily the companies and their businesses. From this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Concerning the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participativeness, the Conference Organisation provided the broadcasting over Internet of the Conference sessions, dialogical and formal presentations, for all authors’ and participants’ institutions, as an innovative Conference feature. In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 97 authors from 10 countries, namely from Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Sweden and United Kingdom. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope and would like that this book will be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the second of which is planned for year 2011.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty papers which were presented in the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2011 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments , held in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, from 22ndto 24thof June, 2011.The main motive of the meeting was growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, and creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily companies and their businesses. Due to this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability 2.0” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Also, the notation“2.0” is to promote the publication as a step further from our previous publication – “Business Sustainability I” – as would be for a new version of software. Concerning the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participation, in accordance with the Conference's assumed mission to promote Proactive Generative Collaborative Learning, the Conference Organisation shares/puts open to the community the papers presented in this book, as well as the papers presented on the previous Conference(s). These papers can be accessed from the conference webpage (http://labve.dps.uminho.pt/bs11). In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 107 authors from 11 countries, namely from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and United States of America. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope, and would like, that this book to be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the third of which is planned for year 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Collaborative and intelligent networks and decision systems and services for supporting engineering and production management

Collaborative networks and systems (CNS) have received much attention in recent decades to reach a competitive advantage [...]This work was supported by national funds through the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia, through the R&D Units Project Scopes: UIDB/00319/2020, UIDB/50014/2020, and EXPL/EME-SIS/1224/2021

Real Time Management in Manufacturing Systems: A State-of-the-art Review - Terminology, Definitions, and Application Areas

The paper presents an introduction to the real time management considering the meta‐theoretical framework for the real time management discipline investigation, the terminology and definitions, and application areas through the state of the art review. The paper presents also some directions for the future work.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A contribution for the development of new resources selection models for the agile/virtual enterprises

The process of resources systems selection, takes an important part in Agile / Virtual Enterprises (A/V E) integration because the efficient resources selection, or resources systems selection, running in useful time and cost and with efficient solution, is an important operation within the A/V E design phase and certainly will contribute for the flexibility of an A/V E within the phase of its reconfiguration. The resources systems selection is a difficult matter to solve in A/V E because: it can be of exponential complexity resolution; it can be a multi criteria problem; and because there are different types of A/V Es with different requirements that have originate the creation of a specific resources selection model for each one of them. This kind of selection approach models will be reviewed from literature and analyzed its limitations and the consequent necessities of development new ones. At the first time we identified necessities that never were thought before, like performance measures for the selection model, and the necessities of identifying the sponsor for the selection process. We will see too that the models fit uniquely the requirements of a unique A/V E are rigid and not flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of another A/V E. These limitations that we highlight in this work are important to be considered in the development of new models and were simultaneously considered in the development of our selection model for the project of the BM_Virtual Enterprise.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Formal description technique SDL for manufacturing systems specification and description

This paper addresses the formal specification and description of manufacturing systems. It is considered the use of SDL (Specification and Description Language), a standard FDT (Formal Description Technique), to model the behaviour, data and structure aspects of a manufacturing system. SDL was originally developed for telecommunication systems (protocol specification and data processing). The adequacy of FDTs, namely SDL, for the manufacturing systems domain is investigated by developing the SDL specification of part of a Distributed/Virtual Manufacturing System cell installation (D/V MS Project), and analysing it

A contribution to clarification of definitions and relationship between processes, operations, process plans, jobs, tasks and orders

The terminology and semantics concerning process plans, operations, orders, jobs and tasks are unfortunately not used in a canonical way, and many times there is misunderstandings, confusion or even ignorance of the relationships between the terms, among the practitioners and students. This paper contributes to clarification of basic canonical definitions and relationship between processes, operations, process plans, jobs, tasks and orders. The paper presents the concepts of “Process Plan”, job, task, orders and their relationship. It is suggested that adoption of canonical forms of these concepts, definitions and relationships will facilitate implementation of advanced methodologies and technologies and techniques and integration with other systems and partners (networking).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Domain of applicability of Value Analysis approach in the pre-selection of resources

For the project of an Agile/Virtual Enterprise (A/V E) the resources selection is a key factor. The output of the selection process should be prepared to guarantee quality, efficiency and cost-attractiveness, in order to ensure the agility and integrability of the A/V E. Despite the potential of Value Analysis (VA), none of the resources selection models found in the literature incorporates the VA integration. The main objective is to quantify the selection process performance with VA integrated into the pre-selection of resources in accordance with the developed model. The paper presents through the simulation results analysis, some of the benefits of VA application: greater applicability domain for candidate resources and number of tasks; and reduction of the selection time.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An analysis about the resources selection process in agile/virtual enterprises

We intend in the context of this work, to do an analysis on studies, literary revisions and mainly on existent models, in the universe of virtual enterprises resources selection, in order to allow us to put on perspective, in a sustainable way, new slopes to be incorporated that contributes to an improvement of the whole global process. This analysis for the A/VE was focused in several areas and basic slopes for the whole global process of the problem in question, namely in terms of the pre-selection phases and requisites; selection phases, requisites and methods; mathematical models, used tools and other important areas. There were incorporated the decision process of create an A/VE project and the requisites of the process principal phases. We approach the essential aspects for the work that is intended to develop, such as the integration of the existent models with the tasks plan (PT) of the product, namely if there are contemplated the eformulation and evaluation of the PT, and other important characteristics such as the weighting of resources and the incorporation of the value concept in the existent models, being that in our opinion an integration of a methodology of the type of Value Analysis will be able to incorporate surplus values in all this process. Conclusions were withdrawn on the whole global process, pointing to gaps and limitations and trying to do an approach which allows to sinthetize and put in perspective an efficient analysis of the whole extent of the problem in question.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio