Antonio Giovannini

Ontology-based system for supporting manufacturing sustainability

Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges of this century either for the environment or economical growth. The required cultural shift needs challenging action that will involve deeply software and hardware aspect of manufacturing processes. In this paper, the software part of the matter is addressed by proposing a product centric ontology, in which concepts of product, processes and resources are associated to functions and sustainable manufacturing knowledge. The aim is to design a knowledge-based system that, simulating a sustainable manufacturing expert, is able to automatically identify change opportunities and to propose alternatives on the basis of the existing production scenario.

Anti-logicist framework for design-knowledge representation

The knowledge reuse and mapping are among the most important concerns related to the design knowledge representation. In this paper, authors focus on the importance of one specific property of a design knowledge representation: the unambiguity. Authors show 1) how the ambiguity of the representation can increase the risk of a failure in the reuse and mapping processes, 2) how most of works in the literature use formal logic constructs and finally 3) how the use of these can increase the risk of ambiguity. On the basis of these remarks, an overview on the works on the anti-logicist architecture is provided: the systems based on this architecture show an intelligent behaviour without using logic constructs. An analysis and a transposition of the anti-logicist principles are then performed to build a framework allowing to represent design knowledge without logic constructs. To do so 1) main concepts are formalised in a conceptual model; 2) an algorithm has been designed to map pieces of knowledge based only on the representation syntax; 3) two instantiations of the framework are showed using a CAD instantiation. Finally, the limits of the current deployment of the framework and the research perspectives are discussed.

Knowledge representation, retrieval and reuse for product family design

An approach for the representation, the retrieval and the reuse of design knowledge for product families design is proposed.All methods in literature rely on (at least) a partial representation based on natural language.The relation between the natural language and the ambiguity of the retrieval (and the consequent reuse) is highlighted.An anti-logicist approach to unambiguously represent the design knowledge.The impacts on the ambiguity of the retrieval and the reuse for the product family design are tested on an industrial case. The product family design is a design approach to meet the demand of customisable products. This paper deals with the knowledge representation, retrieval and reuse supporting the design stage of product families. Usually, the methods in the literature do not focus on the retrieve and the reusability of the knowledge. In other words, they do not ensure if a non-expert user can effectively retrieve and reuse the represented knowledge. To cope with this point, here, the aim is to apply an anti-logicist approach for the unambiguous design-knowledge representation to support the unambiguous retrieval and the automatic reuse of the knowledge during a product family design stage. The retrieval is unambiguous because the link between the knowledge models and the requirements is based on a syntax comparison, e.g. intervals of numbers, units of measure. An algorithm for the automatic reuse has been developed: provided an unambiguous definition of the new requirements related to the product family, the algorithms outputs are the functional and physical definitions of all the products included in the product families, i.e. performances and CAD files. The case study is a family of components of the HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) systems sector. Finally the advantages and issues of a potential industrial implementation are discussed.

Approach for the rationalisation of product lines variety

The product variety management is a key process to deal with the flexibility requested by the mass customisation. In this paper we show that current variety-modelling methods miss a customer representation: without a proper assessment of the customers is not possible to define the product variety that has to be developed to meet the requirements of a customer segment. Here we present an innovative approach to rationalise the product variety, i.e. to link each product variant to the customer profile who needs it. The aim is to optimise the product variety avoiding excesses (variants not related to a customer), lacks (customers not related to a variant) or redundancies (two or more variants proposed to a customer). An overview of customer modelling approaches in the classic product design (non-customisable) is presented. The innovative approach is here developed using system-thinking concepts. A knowledge-based system that uses this approach is designed. Finally the approach is explained using a real industrial case of a quasi-real coil design process.

Knowledge-Based System for Manufacturing Sustainability

Today, sustainability becomes one of the biggest challenges. It represents a key issue in every production activity. To face this issue, a possible solution is to enhance knowledge usage in manufacturing and sustainability domains. In this paper, we extend the ONTO-PDM ontology for formalizing sustainable manufacturing knowledge. An industrial case is presented for instantiating the extension. Moreover we design a knowledge-based system, which exploits sustainable manufacturing knowledge for supporting design and process planning with sustainability proposals, generating machine code starting from product specifications.

Mass Customisation in Sustainable Networked Enterprises

To cope with the customer-oriented business model in a global competitive market, enterprises tend to be networked for achieving mass customisation: i.e. offering customisable products with the same efficiency as mass production. This scenario highlights two faces of variability: variability of needs (on customer side) and variability of organisations (on production side). Both types of variability induce a huge number of specified products, namely configurations. This configuration variability must be efficiently managed. This position paper discusses trends and issues for rationalising the number of configurations: i.e. engineering the right number of configurations that match both the customer needs and the production strategy. After this positioning, we propose a systemic perspective for addressing the discussed issues from a sustainability point of view. Finally we give a perspective for a product line definition method that leads to models that meet the discussed variability rationalisation.

Ontologies for interoperating sustainable manufacturing: new opportunities for the automotive sector

Sustainability is a key issue in every production activity. At the same time, interoperability of the production processes is almost crucial to the most advanced manufacturing processes, particularly for the automotive sector because of its incidence on overall impact on environment. A new question then arise, quite new indeed: how and to which extent the sustainability of processes can be assured in a more complex scenario of interoperating enterprises? The reason is the variety of regions and thus rules, habits and praxes that might be involved along the product life-cycle. In the paper, a possible solution to achieve sustainability of interoperating manufacturing processes is presented. The solution is based on the most advanced artificial intelligence tools: ontologies. The problem here faced is how to structure and design an ontology-based system for supporting decisions assuring sustainable solutions within an interoperability framework. The system devised as well as the consequent structure adopted are discussed by the grace of an example of a simple automotive component.

Hybrid Production-System Control-Architecture for Smart Manufacturing

Highly customized products with shorter life cycles characterize the market today: the smart manufacturing paradigm can answer these needs. In this latter production system context, the interaction between production resources (PRs) can be swiftly adapted to meet both the variety of customers’ needs and the optimization goals. In the scientific literature, several architectural configurations have been devised so far to this aim, namely: hierarchical, heterarchical or hybrid. Whether the hierarchical and heterarchical architectures provide respectively low reactivity and a reduced vision of the optimization opportunities at production system level, the hybrid architectures can mitigate the limit of both the previous architectures. However, no hybrid architecture can ensure all PRs are aware of how orienting their behavior to achieve the optimization goal of the manufacturing system with a minimal computational effort. In this paper, a new “hybrid architecture” is proposed to meet this goal. At each order entry, this architecture allows the PRs to be dynamically grouped. Each group has a supervisor, i.e. the optimizer, that has the responsibility: (1) to monitor the tasks on all the resources, (2) to compute the optimal manufacturing parameters and (3) to provide the optimization results to the resources of the group. A software prototype was developed to test the new architecture design in a simulated flow-shop and in a simplified job shop production.

A Systemic Perspective for Mass Customization: An Approach to Defining Product Lines

Nowadays, the customer-oriented market and the stress on performances lead a lot of enterprises to adopt the Mass Customization (MC) (Davis 1987) strategy as identified in (Tseng and Jiao 2001). Ideally MC is a business approach that provides a product customization capability like an engineer-to-order organization (ETO - the product is designed at each order entry), preserving the mass production efficiency. In this paper, we cope with the formalization of the link between customer needs and the customized product variant that can be configured starting from them. The aim is to propose a way to build this link for formalizing the product variety in the customer domain. This paper is based on industrial cases of Trane, a multinational company that develops, manufactures and commercializes air-handling systems.