Qingyun Dai

Radio frequency identification-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system: A case study in an automotive part manufacturer

Automotive vehicle manufacturers have been at the forefront of employing radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for their manufacturing logistics management. They have benefited from RFID-enabled shop-floor visibility and traceability, which have in turn facilitated the implementation of advanced manufacturing strategies such as just-in-time lean manufacturing and mass customisation. Initial successes have attracted attention and interests from small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in automotive part and component manufacturers down the automotive vertical. However, high levels of capital investments and technical skills have created practical hurdles for automotive SMEs to gain RFID benefits. This article reports on an industrial case study about the RFID implementation project at a typical SME engine valve manufacturer. This company manufactures a large variety of engine valves with a mixture of large and small orders. Work-in-progress items across the company have accumulated to an extreme level for human operations and decisions. The company adopted RFID-enabled shop-floor manufacturing solutions across the whole operations with little experience in the use of information systems/technology. Based on RFID-enabled real-time shop-floor data, the company has extended the efforts in setting up and integrating manufacturing execution system and enterprise resource planning system. The success of this case company demonstrates that RFID is not just for automotive giants but also practically useful to SME suppliers. The article presents a framework that has been followed by this case company with a hope that experiences and insights are useful to other automotive SMEs.

A MPN-based scheduling model for IoT-enabled hybrid flow shop manufacturing

The MPN model can reflect smart objects behaviors enabled by IoT devices.An ACO-based solution is proposed to avoid the stagnation.The comparison result presents the outperformance of average computational cost.The outperformance attributes to the limited values and their ratio. As the wide use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in manufacturing, production decision-makings are revitalized due to the real-time activities and behaviors happened in flow shops. This paper introduces a manufacturing Petri Net-based scheduling model for IoT-enabled hybrid flow shop manufacturing. The proposed model switches the schedule of Token sequences in MPN to the trigger sequence of transition. Thus the real-time production behaviors in IoT-enabled manufacturing flow shops could be modelled. Several contributions are significant. Firstly, the proposed model is able to reflect the real-time behaviors of various smart manufacturing objects enabled by IoT devices so that optimal schedules could be achieved. Secondly, an ant colony optimization (ACO)-based solution is proposed with the confinement of the minimum and maximum pheromone value to avoid the stagnation of the search caused by the pheromone concentration. Thirdly, the comparison of the proposed model and classic ant system presents the outperformance of average computational cost. The outperformance attributes to the limitation of the maximum and minimum of pheromone as well as their ratio so that it has better efficiency. Key findings and observations are summarized as managerial implications which could be used for guiding practitioners to implement the decision-making in IoT-enabled manufacturing flow shops.

RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system for discrete manufacturing: Software design and implementation

Discrete manufacturing (DM) refers to produce products in non-sequential processes so as to respond to market and customer requirements quickly under limited lead-time. However, in shop-floor management, DM companies usually confront challenges such as information gaps between different manufacturing units, slow responsiveness to customer changes, and poor visualization. The main reasons are lacking of efficient manufacturing data collection manners and software to support shop-floor management. This paper introduces an RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system (RT-MES) for improving DM shop-floor management level in the perspective of illustrating the RT-MES software design and implementation. Several contributions from this paper are significant. First, a framework of RFID-enabled RT-MES is proposed, which is generic and helpful for enterprise information system (EIS) construction. Second, a plug-universal database-aided design (PUDAD) concept and its realization are elaborated, which could reduce RT-MES development and implementation cycle. Third, an interface middleware is reported to enable RT-MES real-time intercommunication with other EISs such as SAP ERP. Fourth, a real-life case study describes how RT-MES to enhance a typical DM firms shop-floor management, which can be referenced by other DM companies when they initiate and implement RFID-enabled solutions.

RFID-enabled pharmaceutical regulatory traceability system

Healthcare industry is one of the largest industries all over the world. Nevertheless, counterfeits and medical errors harm its prosperity. At present, researchers focus more on hospital information system, leaving the whole healthcare supply chain out of account. However, overall-process regulation of the whole healthcare supply chain is essential to overcome the predicament. In this study, PharmaX is proposed to shed light on the pharmaceutical traceability and overall-process regulation. This system ensures that all pharmaceutical supply chain participants can integrate with each other, resulting in information sharing, consistency checking and anti-counterfeit. E-pedigree is therefore formed and used to recall defective drugs as well as realize traceability.

Estimation of Lead Time in the RFID-Enabled Real-Time Shopfloor Production with a Data Mining Model

Lead time estimation (LTE) is difficult to carry out, especially within the RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing shopfloor environment since large number of factors may greatly affect its precision. This paper proposes a data mining approach with four steps each of which is equipped with suitable mathematical models to analysis the LTE from a real-life case and then to quantitatively examine its key impact factors such as processing routine, batching strategy, scheduling rules and critical parameters of specification. Experiments are carried out for this purpose and results imply that batching strategy, scheduling rules and two specification parameters largely influence the LTE, while, processing routine has less impact in this case.

A big data cleansing approach for n-dimensional RFID-Cuboids

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in manufacturing sites for supporting the shopfloor management. Huge amount of RFID-enabled production data has been generated. In order to discover invaluable information and knowledge from the RFID big data, it is necessary to cleanse such dataset since there is large number of noises. This paper uses n-dimensional RFID-Cuboids to establish the data warehouse. A big data cleansing approach is proposed to detect, remove and tidy the RFID-Cuboids so that the reliability and quality of dataset could be ensured before knowledge discovery. Experiments and discussions are carried out for validating the proposed approach. It is observed that the proposed big data cleansing approach outperforms other methods like statistics analysis in terms of finding incomplete and missing cuboids.

Special issue on ‘RFID-Enabled Manufacturing: Insights and Lessons from Industrial Cases’

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has received a great deal of attention for its potential ability to perform non-contact object identification and to provide visibility at the point of use in a variety of different industries. Over the last several years, we have seen various applications in the manufacturing industry ranging from inventory monitoring to tool tracking to automatic collection and processing of real-time production data aiming to reduce and avoid the error-prone, tedious manual activities. We have seen that RFID data can be used to generate valuable information, which can reduce inventory levels, cut down lead times, and facilitate enterprise-wide operational visibility throughout the entire product lifecycle across the supply chain. Real-time operational visibility and traceability closes the loop of production planning and control facilitating adaptive decision making. There have been companies who have initiated exploratory efforts for RFID-enabled manufacturing solutions for their day-to-day operations, some on a small scale and some as pilot implementations. Many equipment vendors have developed their RFID solutions and introduced them to the market. Worldwide efforts are in place to develop standards for RFID development and deployment. In spite of all these focused efforts, the progress of achieving the potential benefits of RFID in manufacturing has been slow. The aim of this Special Issue is to solicit and collect valuable insights gained and lessons learned through real-life experiences, including success stories and failures. Eight papers have been selected for inclusion in this Special Issue. It is hoped that this Special Issue inspires more interest and draws more attention to researchers and practitioners in the field. The first paper by Zhu et al. presents a case study on RFID application in a typical household appliance manufacturing environment, in parallel to the barcode technology. While benefits have been reported, several practical issues have also been recognised for those who are considering similar applications. The second paper by Wang, Kowk and Ip deals with the application of RFID for quality evaluation system design for the wine industry. A method of using RFID-enabled real-time data to provide quality evaluation of the final wine has been discussed. The quality evaluation system can discover accidents in time to reduce losses and prevent counterfeit. One-of-a-Kind-Production (OKP) is a non-repetitive manufacturing mode that produces customised products with unique components. Due to the varying production requirements and inadequate operation experience, the unique components and related operations often cause great dynamics in the workshop execution process. The third paper by Wang et al. presents an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-use RFIDenabled manufacturing execution system (MES) to achieve such real-time control for typical OKP workshops. Through the case study in a mould and die manufacturing company, technical, social and organisational issues have been reported. The fourth paper by Chen employs a modular design to develop a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) cell controller based on RFID. This article discusses the feasibility of applying this method to a real production line. It is intended that the proposed method of developing a cell controller could serve as a reference template for tracking and control, facilitating the rapid introduction and application of RFID technology into industrial FMS in the future. The fifth paper by Dai et al. reports on an industrial case study about the RFID implementation project at a typical small-and-medium sized (SME) engine valve manufacturer. The company adopted RFID-enabled shop-floor manufacturing solutions across its entire operations with little experience in the use of information systems/technology. Based on RFID-enabled real-time shop-floor data, the company has extended the efforts in setting up and integrating MES and an enterprise resource planning system. The success of this case company demonstrates that RFID is not just for automotive giants but also practically useful for typical SME automotive part suppliers. The sixth paper by Huang et al. reported on the development and application of RFID-enabled realtime monitoring system (RRMS) to improve visualisation and controllability of the painted body storage (PBS) in a Chinese multi-purpose vehicle manufacturer. RRMS improves the efficiency of operation and makes PBS into a transparent, open and controllable system. Moreover, integrated with MES, RRMS International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing Vol. 25, No. 1, January 2012, 1–2

Petri net-based scheduling analysis of dual-arm cluster tools subject to wafer revisiting and residency time constraints

In semiconductor fabrication, it is very challenging to schedule a cluster tool with wafer revisiting and residency time constraints. For the typical wafer revisiting process of atomic layer deposition (ALD), a Petri net model is developed for the system. Then, with it and based on a 1-wafer cyclic scheduling method previously developed by the authors of this paper, schedulability conditions and scheduling algorithms are derived. The schedulability can be checked by analytical expressions. If schedulable, an optimal 1-wafer cyclic schedule can be analytically found. It is very computationally efficient. An illustrative example is given to show the application of the proposed approach.

RFID-enabled smart assembly workshop management system

Although RFID technologies are enjoying rapid developments, its practical use in manufacturing processes is still limited. Existed applications focus mainly on the pallet-level RFID implementation, which facilitates batch data processing in material handling operations, e.g. material delivery, yet cannot realize real-time lean control for individual parts. This leaves the manufacturing processes as a blank area for taking full advantages of RFID. This paper discusses the item-level RFID implementation in terms of both real-time information control mechanism and system development. A simulated automobile assembly line is employed for concept demonstration. Three questions will be addressed. First, how to use RFID systems to enable the real-time coordination and interaction between the production planning and execution levels to achieve the lean control of manufacturing processes. Second, how to realize the RFID-enabled smart management for typical manufacturing processes, including assembling, packaging, buffering, etc. Thirdly, how to establish a real-time information infrastructure to integrated the typical RFID-enabled smart processes.

A real-time RFID-driven model for two-level production decision-making

This paper is motivated by a real-life production company that has been using RFID technology for supporting its production decision-making, which is divided into production planning and scheduling. Using the concept of advanced production planning and scheduling within hybrid flowshop environment, a real-time RFID-driven model is proposed to twining production planning and scheduling so that these two levels could be synchronized. In experimental examinations, this paper compares this model with rule-based solutions. It is observed that this proposed model is able to reduce the total tardiness comparing with priority-based rules, material-based rules, and SPT.