Synchro-push: A new production control paradigm

The paper aims at proposing a new production control paradigm, the Synchro-push, that offers a step forward with respect to the traditional push and pull production paradigms as for plant re-configurability power and quick reaction to demand changes: in fact, theoretically, it offers the advantages of the two traditional approaches without suffering their drawbacks. This could be of advantage for any manufacturing company and especially for SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises), acting as a support against worldwide competition. The paper presents a brief history of the evolution of the push and pull approaches, the comparison between them and among the different alternatives that have been proposed in literature for their implementation. It presents the new approach, its theory and the subsequent industrial implications. The new approach is now made possible by the development of innovative smart technologies that allow the close-to-real-time decision making in scheduling and a higher level of modularity in the plant

Role of ontologies for CPS implementation in manufacturing

Cyber Physical Systems are an evolution of embedded systems featuring a tight combination of collaborating computational elements that control physical entities. CPSs promise a great potential of innovation in many areas including manufacturing and production. This is because we obtain a very powerful, flexible, modular infrastructure allowing easy (re) configurability and fast ramp-up of manufacturing applications by building a manufacturing system with modular mechatronic components (for machining, transportation and storage) and embedded intelligence, by integrating them into a system, through a network connection. However, when building such kind of architectures, the way to supply the needed domain knowledge to real manufacturing applications arises as a problem to solve. In fact, a CPS based architecture for manufacturing is made of smart but independent manufacturing components without any knowledge of the role they have to play together in the real world of manufacturing applications. Ontologies can supply such kind of knowledge, playing a very important role in CPS for manufacturing. The paper deals with this intriguing theme, also presenting an implementation of this approach in a research project for the open automation of manufacturing systems, in which the power of CPS is complemented by the support of an ontology of the manufacturing domain

Proceedings of The Third International Workshop of the IFIP WG5.7 Special Interest Group on “Advanced Techniques in Production Planning & Control”: 24-25 February 2000, Florence, Italy

Contents of the papers presented at the international workshop deal with the wide variety of new and computer-based techniques for production planning and control that has become available to the scientific and industrial world in the past few years: formal modeling techniques, artificial neural networks, autonomous agent theory, genetic algorithms, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, simulated annealing, tabu search, simulation and so on. The approach, while being scientifically rigorous, is focused on the applicability to industrial environment

Information requirements for e-maintenance strategic planning: a benchmark study in complex production systems

The selection of the maintenance policy is one of the most important decisions of strategic maintenance management. It guarantees not only adequate control of the maintenance costs but also competitive performances of the production system in terms of safety, availability and quality. An optimised selection of the maintenance policy also serves the competitiveness of an e-maintenance service. This calls for fine tuning with the conditions of one plant operations, henceforth integration is required between the plant management and the e-maintenance service provider. Integration may be organised at different levels, i.e. at the strategic or operational level. The paper is concerned with the strategic planning of an e-maintenance service, to properly size the maintenance logistics support. It will present a discussion on the information required to select the policy in the case of an age based component replacement. A test will also prove the information requirements in the context of a simulated machining line wherein the most important loss is system unavailability. A benchmark study is performed therein, in order to analyse how the selection of the maintenance policy may change when information is collected with regard to the production system as a whole instead of its separate equipments. The study will demonstrate that the maintenance policy may change depending on the analysis level, i.e. from equipment level to production system level. The analysis at equipment level will reveal itself to be not so accurate, if compared with the analysis at the system level, as far as the line layout is endowed with some flexibility features and it is operated in a range of medium to high saturation rates. A more comprehensive analysis at the production system level will conversely achieve better performances though a reduced number of preventive maintenance stops during the e-maintenance service operation