Massimo Bianchini

A production system model for Mini-Factories and last mile production approach

Downsizing the production system model within a urban environment represents an opportunity for re-shoring the manufacturing industry. A strong involvement of End Users in product design and development, manufacturing and distribution is essential for traditional SMEs, which strive to find new business opportunities and to be as close as possible to their Customers. Manufacturing systems based on a Mini-Factory approach is one of the modern pervasive production models providing tailored products with low cost and short delivery time. After analyzing the definition and key characteristics of a Mini-Factory in literature, essentially based on contributions by Reichwald, Stotko & Piller [1], a new production system model is proposed. Indeed, due to its peculiarities, this model has been reviewed and updated, to better reflect the challenges in the European furniture sector and to eventually extend the results to further industries.

64Key: A Mesh-based Collaborative Plaform

We present 64Key, a hardware/software platform that enables impromptu sensing, data sharing, collaborative working, and social networking among physically co-located users independently of their own hardware platform, operating system, network stack, and of the availability of Internet access. 64Key caters to those scenarios such as computer labs, large conferences, and emergency situations where the network infrastructure is limited in operation or simply not available, and peer-to-peer interactions are prevented or not possible. By plugging a 64Key device in ones mobile device USB port, an independent network is created on the fly, which users access from their own device though a web-based interface. In addition to default apps such as chat, file sharing, and collaborative text editing, 64Keys functionality may be extended through the run-time installation of third-party apps, available at a public app store. We demonstrate our proof-of-concept implementation of 64Key with multiple apps in a set of key scenarios.