Haluk Soyuer

Scheduling jobs through multiple parallel channels using an expert system

In recent years, as a result of global competition, the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes are becoming much more critical than ever. Information technology constitutes a critical role as a strategic competitive tool in the global business market. In the previous paradigm, the holistic view was missing and ultimately did not contain real life constraints. The new paradigm is based on the systems approach and represents the real life circumstances of production with applicable and sufficient models. This study is based on an expert system for the scheduling of a manufacturing system. The expert system works with a unique algorithm, which has been developed in this paper. The aim is to develop an expert scheduling system which is realistic and applicable to real life situations. Job specification, machine competence, due date, earliest completion and minimum set up time are the factors which have been taken into account to achieve this aim. As a result, the algorithm achieves both applicability and optimality in solution.

An Assessment Model for Organizational Adoption of Industry 4.0 Based on Multi-criteria Decision Techniques

Through the last decade, Industry 4.0 has been a transformative wave of change that affects organizations in several aspects. One of the most crucial elements in this context is the organizational adoption for upcoming changes. In particular, recent literature involves several maturity models where various challenges were discussed in several dimensions/pillars. Such models provide assessments that identify critical aspects that require more intensive efforts for development. However, a more holistic approach that signifies the overall organizational readiness has been scarce in previous research. This study presents an analytical model that provides an overall estimation of organizational readiness to Industry 4.0. This model is a three-stage model. The first stage involves the selection of relevant criteria by high/mid-level decision makers in organizations to be assessed from the criteria pool based on the KPIs discussed in the literature. In the second stage, the model uses decision makers’ pairwise comparisons for relevant criteria and determines the importance weights of these criteria using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method. In the last stage, decision-makers evaluate the level of organizations with the group decision under relevant criteria. The TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method with predetermined ideal and negative ideal solutions is applied using these evaluations to reveal the readiness level of organizations to Industry 4.0. The model is applied to a company operating in the apparel industry in Turkey, and organizational readiness level of the company to Industry 4.0 is evaluated.