Autonomous Energy-aware production systems control

Energy and resource efficiency has recently become one of the most relevant topics of research in manufacturing, both as industry accounts for a major part of the world energy consumption and in the context of the increasing attention to the need of sustainable development at planetary level. This work aims at paving the way to the development of novel energy-aware control policies of production systems, by means of autonomous decisions about their states in terms of production and energy consumption, exploiting the possibilities given by the new ICT technologies, such as Internet of Things and cloud computing, which allow seamless information sharing among the machines through an appropriate and standardized ICT infrastructure. The energy saving control approach investigated in this work exploits the current trend in research to reduce the idle time of machines in favor of stand-by states, obtaining significant savings in terms of energy, by allowing novel solutions for decentralized control. The proposed control enables the production machines to autonomously share with and process the information of the other machines in the system to decide in real-time their specific energy behaviour, even postponing processing if that is possible. The approach adopted includes conceptual development of the dynamic behaviour models of the system and the proposed policies, then their deployment in an application scenario taken by actual industry cases and data, enabling study of the performance of the system with a detailed design of experiments. The proposed approach represents a significant contribution to the state of the art, as the proposed energy-aware control enables decisions based on real-time information instead of statistically-based forecasts of part arrival rates, as in the previous literature; furthermore the approach is of relevant value for the practitioner, especially as it paves the way to an operationalization to the vision of Cyber-Physical Systems and Industry 4.0

The Operator 4.0: Towards socially sustainable factories of the future

Humans are all makers of a sort. The tools we operate constantly leverage our human capabilities and evolve over history to take advantage of any innovation or a new source of power that emerges. Human-Technology Symbiosis has always been the basis for leaps in human prosperity. As we are presently in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, it is important to focus on challenges and opportunities of contemporary work-life. Here we find the worker, the operator, benefitting from cyber-physical systems technology, connectivity, and global information networks while retaining human strengths and weaknesses. This special issue will describe the implications of a new breed of the manufacturing worker, “The Operator 4.0”. The 13 contributions in this special issue will take us from the early anthropocentric organisational models to the emerging connected and cyber-physically enhanced “Operator 4.0” in highly dynamic work environments. Methods and tools for development and analysis of complex work will support the scholar or practitioner that would like to dig deeper into the future of the potential work-life of the Operator 4.0

State of the art of technology in the food sector value chain towards the IoT

The food sector is challenged to provide safe and qualitative food to consumers at affordable price and to feed appropriately increasing population using natural resources, like soil and water, in a sustainable way. Consumers awareness about food origin, nutritional and wellness properties, attention to processed meals ingredients, due to health issues, and requests of new customized portions formats and receipts, related to habits changes, are also demanding trends in the sector. Several technologies can help to address those responsibilities of efficient, safe and environmental respectful production, and strict communication and connection with the consumers. This paper provides a state of the art of smart and other emerging technologies framed in the whole food supply-chain, to create a picture of the added value that the technology can bring to the sector. Moreover, the evolutions towards the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm adoption are presented

Sustainability in manufacturing strategy deployment

The focus of the paper is the development of a reference model for manufacturing strategy implementation. While many empirical research endeavors report the lack of vigor in implementing sustainability as a manufacturing strategy, also current popular theory-driven approaches are not sufficient to understand the dynamics and organizational barriers in implementing sustainability as a manufacturing strategy. This paper develops a reference model based on systems theory principles and the Viable System Model (VSM). The complexity-based approach helps decision-makers to manage firm-tailored sustainable manufacturing improvement programs

Cyber-physical systems in manufacturing: Future trends and research priorities

In the last decades, the manufacturing ecosystem witnessed an unprecedented evolution of disruptive technologies forging new opportunities for manufacturing companies to cope the ever-growing market pressure. Moreover, the race to create value for the customers has been hindered by several issues that both small and large companies have been facing, such as shorter product life cycles, rapid time-to-market, product complexity, cost pressure, increased international competition, etc. In this scenario, ICT represent a crucial enabler for preserving competitiveness and fostering industry innovation. In particular, among these technologies, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is growing an ever-high interest of industry stakeholders, researchers, practitioners and policy makers as they are considered the key technology that will transform manufacturing industry to the next generation. Indeed, CPS is a breakthrough research area for ICT in manufacturing and represents the cornerstone for achieving the EU2020 "smart everywhere" vision. At this early development phase, there is the urgent need to set the ground for future research streams, create a common understanding and consensus, define viable migration paths and support standards definition. This paper describes the identified research challenges and the future trends that will drive to the adoption of CPS in manufacturing. The main evidences on researches challenges expected for CPS in manufacturing are outlined by the authors that have been involved in the sCorPiuS project 'European Roadmap for Cyber- Physical Systems in Manufacturing', promoted by the European Commission to define a roadmap for future CPS in manufacturing adoption research agenda

A conceptual data model promoting data-driven circular manufacturing

Circular economy (CE) paradigm fosters manufacturing companies’ sustainability taking place through different circular manufacturing (CM) strategies. These strategies allow companies to be internally committed to embrace circular values and to be externally aligned with several stakeholders not necessarily belonging to the same supply chain. Nevertheless, these CM strategies adoption is limited by heterogeneous barriers, among which the management and sharing of data and information remain the most relevant ones, bounding the decision-making process of manufacturers in CM. Moreover, the extant literature unveiled the need to structure data and information in a reference model to make them usable by manufacturers. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to propose a reference model by developing a conceptual data model to standardise and structure the necessary data in CM to support manufacturers’ decision-making process. Through this model, data and information to be gathered by manufacturers are elucidated, providing an overview of which ones should be managed internally, and shared externally, clarifying the presence of their mutual interdependencies. The model was conceptualised and developed relying on the extant literature and improved and validated through academic and industrial experts’ interviews

Gap analysis on Research and Innovation for Cyber-Physical Systems in Manufacturing

In defining the Roadmap of the Research Priorities for the adoption of CPS in manufacturing industry, it is crucial to identify the key elements preventing a fast and smooth transition from the current status to the desired one. In such complex environments characterized by many industrial sectors and processes, external factors and social/economical influences, it is important to address only the main issues to achieve the result. This paper is aiming to illustrate the results of the Gap Analysis activities carried out in the sCorPiuS (http://scorpius-project.eu/) project

Serious gaming supporting competence development in sustainable manufacturing

Becoming a sustainable global manufacturing enterprise is a challenge for almost every manufacturing organization in the world because of its multidimensional nature. Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience and competences. Traditional ways to create such experience and develop competences like role playing and simulations tend to take a lot of time and are expensive. On the other hand, serious gaming has proven to support learners in acquiring new and complex knowledge and is ideally suited to support problem based learning by creating engaging experiences around a contextual problem where users must apply competences to solve these presented challenges. This chapter introduces a new learning environment which is build around a gaming engine supporting the development of competences in specific subject areas. Selected competences in sustainable global manufacturing lead to the definition of scenarios, which then can be executed by a game engine, thus creating experience within the user. A knowledge ecology space allows the user to interact and reflect on learning outcomes with other participants. The subject of sustainable global manufacturing is the application case presented in this chapter showing how specific competences in this area have been identified and how a game scenario has been developed. Finally, its implementation and evaluation is discussed

Sustainability paradigm in the cosmetics industry: State of the art

Sustainability is one of the main impacting trends that is shaping today’s industries, and the cosmetics sector is no exception. The paper presents a systematic literature review of the sustainability paradigm affecting cosmetics industry, trying to investigate the state of the art of the scientific literature about the embracement of sustainability and Circular Economy paradigm by the cosmetics sector, digging deeper the distinctive practices that should be employed by companies along the cosmetic product lifecycle, and the connection with the several stakeholders involved in the Green Transition path. The study has been pursued from a double perspective: firstly, from a final customer’s point of view, trying to understand which main factors are influencing the green purchasing behavior in the cosmetics industry and their managerial implications. Then, from a product lifecycle perspective, deepening what are the best practices for the development of a sustainable cosmetic product. Moreover, the paper proposes possible insights to develop a managerial framework able to support cosmetics SMEs in their transition toward sustainability, starting from the findings identified in the literature review