Giovanni Perrone

Business process-oriented design of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for small and medium enterprises

In the last few years, many organizations have used business process modelling as an effective tool for managing organizational changes. However, process modelling has rarely been exploited for supporting the entire business process management life cycle. This includes the design of business processes as well as their implementation and control. The adoption and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is a crucial issue if referred to small and medium-sized enterprises. The main problem is that the cost of implementation of ERP, intended as the process of customization of the ERP system towards the actual enterprise business processes, overtakes the cost of ERP acquisition. Thus, there is a need to use the same workflow systems for both modelling the enterprise business processes and designing the ERP. The paper presents the results of a collaborative project between academia and industry aimed at developing a business process management integrated approach to the design, implementation and control of an ERP information system.

Production planning in reconfigurable enterprises and reconfigurable production systems

Reconfigurable enterprises and reconfigurable production systems represent nowadays one of the key responses towards the organisational and manufacturing needs arising in the new era known as mass customization. The paper proposes an Agent Based approach for the production planning activities in reconfigurable enterprises, characterized by complex, articulated and geographically distributed production capacities contended by many product families and composed by reconfigurable production systems that allow quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality consenting to manufacture different products of the same part family.

Coordination policies to support decision making in distributed production planning

Abstract Distributed production networks are considered organizational structures able to match agility and efficiency necessary to compete in the global market. Performances of such organization structures heavily depend on the ability of the network actors of coordinating their activities. The research proposes to model and design coordination problems within production network by using the Multiple Agent Technology. In particular, the paper proposes new strategies for coordinating production-planning activities within production networks. Such models have been developed and tested by using a proper simulation environment developed by using open source code and architecture. The results of the research can be located at two levels: (a) concerning the specific coordination problem addressed, the research provides some insights to make decisions about the choice of coordination approaches to be used in distributed production planning problems; (b) at more strategic level, the paper shows how Agent Technology and discrete event simulation can be used to build up efficient coordination structures for production networks.

An Object-Oriented Approach for Flexible Manufacturing Control Systems Analysis and Design Using the Unified Modeling Language

In reacting to global competition and rapidly changing customer demands, industrial business organizations have developed a strong interest in flexible automation. The aim of flexible automation focuses on achieving agility in handling uncertainties from internal or external environments. Modeling complex structures, promoting reuse, and shortening the development time cycle are particularly significant aspects in the analysis and design of CIM systems, where heterogeneous elements have to be integrated in a complex control architecture. The design methodology for FMS control software involves the abstraction of an FMS and the estimation of the system performances. The aim of this activity is to suggest the optimal configuration of an FMS for given specifications, through simulation tools. In the software engineering field, object-oriented (OO) approaches have proven to be a powerful technique with respect to such aspects. The unified modeling language (UML), by using OO design methodologies, can offer reusability, extendibility, and modifiability in software design. Also, it bridges the gap that exists between the OO analysis and design area and the area of OO programming by creating an integrative metamodel of OO concepts. The specific goal of this paper is to formulate a new methodology for developing reusable, extendible, and modifiable control software for an FMS in an object-oriented environment. It is demonstrated that, with few diagrams, UML can be used to model such systems without being associated with other modeling tools.

Reconfiguration: a key to handle exceptions and performance deteriorations in manufacturing operations

During a manufacturing operation, exceptions may occur dynamically and unpredictably. Their occurrence may lead to the degradation of system performance or, in the worst case scenario may interrupt the production process by causing errors in the schedule plan. This paper classifies three families of exceptions: (1) out-of-order events such as machine breakdowns, (2) operational out-of-ordinary events such as rush orders and (3) deteriorations of manufacturing resource performance such as reductions of machines’ utilization. In all cases, in order to maintain an adequate level of system performance, it is necessary to detect exceptions, to diagnose them quickly and to recover them by taking corrective actions to avoid fault propagations. Decisions concerning how to deal with exceptions, i.e. which strategy to implement, depend on the manufacturing environment (dedicated line, flexible system, reconfigurable system or a mix of them) and the advantages arising from using a certain exception handling policy vary from one production system to another. The activity of reconfiguring manufacturing resources has been demonstrated to be a powerful operation strategy to handle machine breakdowns. This paper extends the concept of ‘reconfiguration for exception handling’ to other families of exceptions and proposes reconfiguration for their recovery. The reconfiguration process is handled by an agent-based control system that implements four negotiation processes among manufacturing resource agents.

High Level Planning of Reconfigurable Enterprises: a Game Theoretic Approach

Reconfigurable Enterprises (REs) represent production networks made of different and geographically dispersed plants that, in case of unpredictable market changes, can be reconfigured in order to gather a specific production objective. However, REs effectiveness and efficiency depend on the extent to which global performance is obtained. Basically two approaches are available to reach coordination: centralised or decentralised planning tools. In this paper, the authors propose a novel cooperative game theoretical approach for distributed production planning at high level of a RE; the proposed approach has been benchmarked in front of both a distributed one, based on negotiation, and a centralized one.

Fuzzy multiple criteria decision model for the evaluation of AMS

Abstract The economic justification of advanced manufacturing systems is very important today, but it is difficult to obtain sound answers using ordinary financial techniques, such as discounted cash flow (DCF) measures. These techniques over-simplify investment decisions, because they are unable to account for the strategic issues and for the uncertainty of financial flows present in AMS investments. In this paper, a fuzzy multiple criteria decision model is presented. A fuzzy set theory approach is suggested because it is able to tackle both the linguistic assessments necessary for strategic issues, and the uncertainty of financial flows. The proposed method calculates a fuzzy integrated index that brings together both the qualitative and quantitative, but uncertain, issues. Ranking the investment alternatives based on this index, the analyst can determine which option is more suited to the companys objectives.

Negotiation in distributed production planning environments

Mass customization and global competition push enterprises to adopt proper business models able to capture all the opportunities arising from emerging competition rules. An increasing number of industrial enterprises distribute their production capacity world wide to achieve lower production costs, lower distribution costs (due to the closer proximity to customers), and deeper knowledge of customer needs. As a drawback, coordination of the different production plants and the balance among plants and enterprise goals represent a critical issue in the network management. In this context the paper looks at the production planning problem, adopting a traditional hierarchical time-based perspective in the analysis of the global process and suggesting a decentralized planning approach to deal with the originated subtasks related to different time horizons. In particular, the paper suggests a production planning architecture able to highlight relationships among subtasks’ variables in which mechanisms assure consistency among solutions of different planning levels. Moreover, the paper proposes negotiation frameworks as effective tools to manage production planning subtasks.

Negotiation mechanisms for capacity allocation in distributed enterprises

Abstract The paper proposes an agent based approach for the capacity allocation in distributed enterprises, characterized by complex and articulated organizations and by geographically distributed production capacities contended by many product families. In such a scenario the process of allocating the production capacity to the single customer order is one the major bottlenecks of the production planning activity as far as many organizational decisional levels are involved and market turbulence implies a continuous retuning of the capacity allocation plan. A high grade of reactiveness is needed. Agent based approaches and negotiation models, by decentralizing the decisional control and simplifying the decision itself, make the capacity allocation process enough reactive. Although, when the actors involved in the negotiation have different decisional powers and different knowledge, the problem of decentralization and specifically the design of the negotiation mechanism become very complex. This paper proposes two negotiation models for the capacity allocation process in distributed enterprises. The models, rationalised by using the standard IDEF3 representation, have been tested in the industrial environment of a primary semiconductor company.

Long term capacity decisions in uncertain markets for advanced manufacturing systems incorporating scope economies

Abstract By examining the literature in the field of manufacturing flexibility many researchers have located several form of flexibility by distinguishing them into strategic and operational flexibility forms. Furthermore, many measures and design methods have been proposed for flexible manufacturing systems. Surely scope economies are one of the most important strategic form of flexibility in manufacturing systems and their strategic impact has been acknowledged by the very beginning of the flexible manufacturing era. However, despite several researches are available to address scope economies measurement and design methodologies, very few researches investigate their economic convenience in front of dedicated manufacturing systems depending on the competitive market conditions. This paper proposes a theoretical model whose main aim is the general understanding of the convenience conditions of scope economies-based manufacturing systems. The results of the theoretical model are very interesting, because they locate market conditions that make scope economies manufacturing systems less profitable than dedicated manufacturing ones; moreover, the proposed model sets some general criteria to guide the entrepreneur in making right investment decision regarding this kind of manufacturing investments. Such results can explain the reason of many failures of flexible manufacturing systems and it suggests the use of this kind of approach to investigate other flexibility forms of manufacturing systems. The ultimate goal of this research is the construction of a Decision Support System for supporting the entrepreneur in making decision on Advanced Manufacturing Systems investment decisions.