Claudio R. Boër

Present and future of flexible automation: Towards new paradigms

Abstract Automation has been one of the key drivers of the modern Manufacturing Industry and it has been present in various forms from the beginning of the industrial era until today passing through different evolutions responding to humans needs. Therefore automation and the manufacturing industry have undergone several paradigm changes in the last century. They were driven by the market conditions and society needs and were realized by timely developed engineering enabling technologies that fitted the paradigm requirements. This paper maps the different paradigms in terms of market and societal drivers and process technology enablers in order to show a consistent model of paradigm development, a model that links the product, and the process with the appropriate business model. The Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) have been especially analysed as the major enabler to the mass customization paradigm. Summing up, a mapping methodology, able to map all past, present and future production paradigms, is presented. An example on the footwear sector has also been mapped and presented. The analysis is based on a survey conducted in Europe and the USA mechanical industries during 2002. The analysis, carried out within the CIRP Working Group on “Flexible Automation - Assessment and Future” has shown that new paradigms are emerging beyond flexible automation, paradigms that require addressing new technological challenges. Developing these new enabling technologies requires the establishment of new national RTD programmes. Therefore, the role of past national RTD programmes in developing previous enabling technologies that eventually elevated human wealth and life quality is also briefly mentioned. Foresight scenario building and “roadmapping” activities -taking place in different relevant economic regions- are presented. They point to new paradigms and technologies to be developed and call for new RTD programmes to be launched.

Virtual Factory Framework: Key Enabler For Future Manufacturing

The global market with increasing competition calls for new strategies that strengthen the future manufacturing systems. This paper presents the underlying models and ideas enabling a new conceptual framework for the next generation of Virtual Factory implementations. The approach fosters four pillars: a standard extensible data model; decoupled functional modules, based on an object oriented Virtual Factory paradigm; an event driven paradigm at the core of abstract objects management; the integration of knowledge at different layers for the decoupled functional modules. The implementation of a Virtual Factory based on the presented framework, points to the usefulness when developing future manufacturing systems.

Integrated production plant (IPP): an innovative laboratory for research projects in the footwear field

This paper describes the facilities that are available at the ITIA Design and Mass Customization Laboratory of Vigevano. The history of the Laboratory and how ITIA has come, through different research projects, to the implementation of the integrated production plant (IPP) is presented. Then the main features, in terms of structures, system architectures and implemented technologies, of the IPP will be described, showing how such innovative research infrastructure will be used in the final phases of the EUROShoE project, in particular for what concerns the research related to the mass customization paradigm and its application in different industrial sectors. These phases will be described in details indicating the roles of the different elements of the system and their respective interactions, in terms of the vertical (between sale, design and manufacturing) and horizontal (between different machines and systems within the same phase of the product life cycle) integration. Aspects related to the experimental validation of such technologies in a quasi–productive environment are also presented, showing how the experimental campaigns are planned and organized. Future uses and applications of the IPP as a public research infrastructure at the European level are presented in the conclusions.

Integrated computer aided design for assembly systems

Assembly being the last step of the production cycle of a product, it is normally submitted to the constraints of the precedent step. Techniques like Design for Assembly have been developed to try to take into consideration the peculiarities of the assembly process and reduce costs. The paper present the research and development of an integrated computer aided design for assembly system. The project main aim is to obtain methodologies and tools to design and manage a complete flexible assembly system but in this paper we will describe a CAAP (Computer Aided Assembly Planning) for the determination of gripping features, gripper and finger configuration, assembly sequence, simulation of the assembly system for the design of management rules, three dimensional simulation of robots (serial and parallel) for the design of each single assembly and control cell. The results of the project is tested in a specifically designed and implemented system for the assembly of electro-mechanical components.

Methodological Approach and Reconfiguration Tool for Assembly Systems

Assembly lines design is intended to solve many problems related to assembly operations. The introduction of a new product should often entail the salvage of existing assembly lines. This work proposes a methodology for assembly line reconfiguration, to rationalize and support the redesign process of assembly systems. This research formalizes a representation model and a method for assembly line reconfiguration. The model describes the main characteristics and significant features of the assembly process. The study is concerned with three fundamental models, the first describes assembly line structures. The second illustrates component assembly features and the third produces all the assembly sequences. The assembly line reconfiguration method provides an analysis and estimation tool on the reconfiguration process complexity. The method proposed is also meant to be a tool to identify the operational flexibility limit. The method results point out the way to implement assembly system reconfiguration and gives detailed information about the assembly line. Each assembly line, facing a new product to be assembled, is processed with the reconfiguration method and receives operative results for reconfiguration process and quality indicators.

Virtual reality as a support tool in the shoe life cycle

The life cycle of an industrial product goes through several stages, from the initial idea to the finished product, and on to the purchase and recycling. Virtual reality environments (VRE) allow the user to interact with a digital representation of a product, and so can be used to perform aesthetical, ergonomic, functional tests as well to support customer decisions in the selling process; mainly for customized products. In this contribution, ITIA-CNR presents two important applications in the shoes context: VRShoe and MagicMirror. VRShoe is a VRE for designing shoe aesthetics. MagicMirror, currently under development, is an augmented reality (AR) system for supporting the decision-making processes of customer customized shoes.

Process planning and scheduling for mass customised shoe manufacturing

In the scenario of mass customization, production is a crucial phase of the whole product life cycle. Production planning and scheduling must therefore evolve and adopt new tools that help to obtain a deeper control of what has to be produced in order to satisfy efficiently customer’ needs. This is very important in the clothing and footwear (fashion) industry where customers taste and choices change rapidly according to fashion dictates. In this paper an application in the footwear sector is presented and tested on a prototype of a new factory – an agile production unit – based on the concepts of agile and flexible production. The planning and scheduling module proposed is mainly focused on the short term in order to respond quickly to market needs and changes in a flexible manner. The module is composed of a finite capacity scheduler integrated with a new software based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process decision support system, which considers all the aspects related to order importance as complexity or urgency and assign each order a priority. This SW is able to take into account many intangible factors, as trademark, that are usually submitted to the subjective judge of the production manager (planner) and is completely configurable according to user’ needs. The result of the elaboration, that is the priority value, constitutes a fundamental input for the scheduler in addition to the due date of the order. The scheduler has a daily horizon because it is unnecessary to cover a long-time period if things can change every day following market requirements. The scheduler is configured to create all cycle operations for each single item even in order to manage orders composed of one pair or even one single shoe. This is a fundamental condition under a custom-made production focus. This also allows operation fine control and monitoring of the manufacturing process because the control system can identify exactly where each item at each time is in the system. Concluding, further developments are considered within a more integrated ad extended scenario applied to the automated production system in a new project where the full product life cycle including the customer, retailer shop and suppliers are taken into consideration.

Criteria for Optimum Layout Design of Assembly Systems

Abstract The performance and the return of investment for Assembly Systems are very much dependent on the throuput of the system, on the utilisation of the more important components (robots, AGVS, etc.) and on the reusing of these components in different configurations. The paper deals with the criteria for optimum layout design and how simulation is used to validate the criteria.

Universities as key enablers to develop new collaborative environments for innovation: successful experiences from Switzerland and India

A large variety of organisational forms for collaboration have emerged during the last years as a result of the many socio-economic challenges faced by the society and enabled by the new ICT developments. As a result, in both developed and developing countries, different initiatives are carried out to motivate organisations, to network in new collaborative environments for innovation. In few cases, these initiatives have been promoted by Universities where academic researchers play a very important role by diffusing these networking concepts to local SMEs and by carrying out applied projects to coach and guide firms in the formation of these new collaborative environments. The Virtuelle Fabrik and Swiss Microtech in Switzerland and the TeNeT group in India are three successful collaborative environments located in different settings where a local university has played, and still plays, a very important role for the collaborative environments’ creation, continuous evolution and improvement. Therefore, the objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to describe the local university key role for developing new collaborative environments and (2) to propose a methodology to benchmark and assess the different initiatives carried out by universities to develop new successful collaborative environments, identifying critical success factors (CSFs).

Editorial: Shoe design and manufacturing

Manufacturing has been the prime driver in the evolution of society from an agricultural centred to an industrial centre. However, manufacturing has also evolved through time and several paradigms can be identified as described in table 1 (Jovane et al. 2003). One of the main trends in today’s market is that of ‘mass customization’. This represents a new market paradigm that is changing the way consumer products are designed, manufactured, delivered and recycled. Manufacturing technology started with an artisan at work making a single product for a single customer, and as such was well recognized as craft production, as illustrated in figure 1. Manufacturing continued to evolve in the late 1800s during the Industrial Revolution, pioneering mass production at the beginning of the 20th century. Today this market of mass production is changing and moving towards the new paradigm of mass customization. It is thus recognized that are current and future manufacturing challenges returning to those of the original craft production age, but with the added advantages and complexities of using today’s advanced manufacturing systems and technologies. Therefore, one view of mass customization could be as having the ideals of craft production expressed through modern industrial technology. As identified by Piller et al. (2000), mass customization aims to offer consumers, goods and services that are more tailored to their specific needs and tastes. This implies having the capability of conjugating the efficiency and the scale economy of mass production with the possibility of manufacturing small batches and batches of one, of very diversified and personalized products. The result of which places a very strenuous challenge on the entire company organization, whose procedures and management approaches then require a thorough revision, especially in the manufacturing area. This is certainly true also for shoe production; as footwear manufacturing is increasingly confronted with a progressive reduction in the size of the production batches. Combined with the variability of styles that tends to overstretch the traditional work organization and with a demand for minimizing delivery times, manufacturing support systems do not as yet approach the levels of flexibility and quick response required for the production of mass customized products. However, since a noticeable demand for such products is becoming evident among shoe consumers, footwear companies will soon have to confront the kind of technical challenges above mentioned. To understand the implication ofmass customization on shoe manufacturing researchers need to find a more accurate definition to enable this concept of customization to be applied to footwear. If customization, in general terms, means introducing a product to a certain number of personalized features that somehow reflect consumer desires, shoe customization can be thought of in several levels namely (Boër and Dulio (2003):