Paola Fantini

Towards environmental conscious manufacturing

Growing global competition, environmental concerns, legal and market requirements motivate production companies to strengthen their capability to monitor and control their factories. SCADA, MES, ERP and EAI provide limited and fragmented awareness on the behavior and performance of the manufacturing systems from the production, economic and environmental perspective. The introduction of wired or wireless sensor networks increases the available information for improved control, anomaly detection and condition monitoring on a local scale or with reference to specific systems. This paper presents a proposal for a holistic environmental conscious perspective of the factory, enabling identification and minimization of inefficiencies in the use of energy and resources, control of the environmental impact and maximization of manufacturing and economic performances.

Exploring the integration of the human as a flexibility factor in CPS enabled manufacturing environments: Methodology and results

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are expected to shape the evolution of production towards the fourth industrial revolution named Industry 4.0. The increasing integration of manufacturing processes and the strengthening of the autonomous capabilities of manufacturing systems make investigating the role of humans a primary research objective in view of emerging social and demographic megatrends. Understanding how the employees can be better integrated to enable increased flexibility in manufacturing systems is a prerequisite to allow technological solutions, as well as humans, to harness their full potential. Humans can supervise and adjust the settings, be a source of knowledge and competences, can diagnose situations, take decisions and several other activities influencing manufacturing performances, overall providing additional degrees of freedom to the systems. This paper, studies two different integration models: Human-in-the-Loop and Human-in-the-Mesh. They are both analysed in the context of four industrial cases of deployment of cyber physical systems in production.

Social Sustainability: Perspectives on the Role of Manufacturing

The notion of social sustainability has been developed aiming at global growth. Policy makers have elaborated on this concept at regional and country level. Institutions and associations representing the scientific and technological environment have proposed their visions. Enterprises have adopted Corporate Social Responsibility practices. In this context, the role of manufacturing may have appeared so far limited to the specific aspects related to the workplaces. However, a broader perspective can lead to an extended awareness on how manufacturing can contribute to the social sustainability.

Towards industrial exploitation of innovative and harmonized production systems

Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety and shorter time-to-market. To face this challenge, the manufacturing industry is forced by different initiatives, namely Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0 and Cyber-Physical System to move from traditional control approaches towards intelligent manufacturing control systems that are dynamically adaptable to changing production environment and flexible to different processing tasks. For years several emergent intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems, Service-oriented Architecture, Plug-and-Produce systems and Cloud technologies have been developed in a variety of research fields. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems outlining the differences between them and arising benefits within the vision of the PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) project. Current trends and challenges in industrial implementation of these methodologies are reported and research opportunities are described.

A Multi-horizon, Multi-objective Training Planner: Building the Skills for Manufacturing

Fast technological progress and the dynamics generated by economic, ecological and societal mega-trends are putting manufacturing companies under strong pressure to radically change the way in which they operate and innovate. Consequently, human work in manufacturing is also visibly changing and the need to up-skill and re-skill workers is rapidly increasing in order to sustain industry competitiveness and innovativeness as well as employability. Life-long training is therefore crucial to achieve the vision of a successful and socially sustainable manufacturing ecosystem in which industry, society and individuals can thrive together. In this paper we present a novel training planner, which provides worker-specific training recommendations based on workers’ knowledge, skills and preferences, job content and allocation statistics, and factory demands. Multiple objectives, related to economic and social performances are taken into account.

The Interplay Between Product-Services and Social Sustainability: Exploring the Value Along the Lifecycle

Our understanding of the interplay between product-services and social sustainability is still very limited. This paper sheds light on the interconnections between social sustainability and product-services throughout their life-cycle, and identifies a set of common topics and practices to be investigated by experts of Advances in Production Management Systems. In doing so, the paper sets the stage for future efforts aimed at exploiting the opportunities identified and exploring new synergies between product-services and social sustainability.

Human-Centric Manufacturing Workplaces: Aiming at Increasing Attractiveness and User Experience

The pursuit of Human-Centric Manufacturing Workplaces is one of the strategic objectives of the industrial and academic research community, as a contribution to the creation of sustainable and attractive jobs in production. The concepts of User experience (UX), Interactive Virtual Prototyping (VP) and the connected scientific background can lead to new perspectives and methods for the design and evaluation of future workstations. The traditional focus on productivity and ergonomics, might be extended to encompass multisensory features and to consider the different usage stages in order to improve the experience of the workers and contribute to enhance the attractiveness of manufacturing workplaces. The application case of a train manufacturer’s is taken to exemplify possible results of the application of this UX and VP-inspired approach to the design of Human-Centric Manufacturing Workplaces.

Human-centric factories 4.0: A mathematical model for job allocation

In Industry 4.0 the optimal allocation of a pool of available workers is a very important issue. Solving this problem can improve the performance of the company and the life of workers with positive returns on productivity. Moreover, from a computational perspective, this problem is extremely interesting because it could have a combinatorial explosion and become very hard to solve. In this paper, a mathematical model applied to a real business case is presented. Some preliminary tests and results are discussed.

Prerequisites and Conditions for Socially Sustainable Manufacturing in Europe’s Future Factories – results overview from the SO SMART Project

This paper provides an overview of the EU project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a coordinated support action (CSA) project. SO SMART examined the conditions in Europe for creating socially sustainable workplaces in the manufacturing sector, where factories flourish along with their social environment. The project was international (with partners from five countries), multidisciplinary and participatory, involving participation of several science domain experts and a wider community of academic and industry beneficiaries who participated in panels, workshops, conference events and an online forum created specifically for the project.

Socially Sustainable Manufacturing: Exploring the European Landscape

Sustainable manufacturing has been extensively researched in the last decades, however there is a lack of coherence in literature specifically addressing its social dimension. Within the framework of the Social Sustainability-themed project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a preliminary explorative survey and interview study were deployed among manufacturing companies and their stakeholders in Europe to investigate the extent to which they understand and practice social sustainability in relation to their business activities and context. Using an inquiry approach based on the main concepts related to social sustainability found in literature, this paper reports findings on preliminary exploration of the European landscape of social sustainability-related practices from a corporate and societal perspective. Findings contribute to the creation of a basis of shared knowledge as a prerequisite for extending and further developing concepts and models for socially sustainable manufacturing ecosystems.