Advances in Production Management Systems. Innovative and Knowledge-Based Production Management in a Global-Local World

Product Life Cycle (PLC) has been used to analyze the behavior of a product during its time of production. The success of enterprises depends on its capacity of aligning Supply Chain Strategy (SCS) with PLC. The purpose of this work was to develop a model to align the right SCS with PLC stage. This research shows three case studies and results provides that different companies used diverse approaches on managing life cycle of its products. However, they were successful in reaching competitive advantage due to correct alignment between SCS with PLC.

The construction area in Brazil have different challenges to become more productive, efficient and sustainability. The objective is analyze the profile of projects offices at Brazil´s southeast region to determine the design tools used for project development and their characteristics in civil construction area. The strategy was a technical review about this issue in periodic papers and a survey, applied online, for project experts. The results shows that CAD – Computer Aided Design – tools still have more presence and BIM – Building Information Modeling – software is gaining space inside offices, but still have problems that need be resolved. Besides, inside the context, BIM tools have qualities aligned with actual demands that put it in evidence to resolve historical problems at civil construction context.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an industrial investigation, conducted within a leading power generation manufacturer, to better understand the organisational processes and challenges present in relation to the management and sharing of knowledge during product manufacturing. Findings reveal that the organisation is failing to fully benefit from web 2.0 technologies and particularly micro-blogging. Details of the investigation results are presented and a conceptual framework is proposed to demonstrate how organisations may enhance the sharing of explicit manufacturing knowledge using micro-blogging tools.

In the actual knowledge-based economy, intangible assets are crucial. Those assets cannot be created without the creativity of the employees. Despite the phenomenal amount of works published on creativity, only a few are related to Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). Furthermore, a literature review made evident that a proper definition of what is a creative SME does not exist, even though it is important for practitioners, researchers and professionals in this domain. A definition of a creative SME needs to include external characteristics, ones that are easy to recognize from an observer’s point of view. This research is thus trying to answer the following question: “How can we recognize a creative SME?” By using a Delphi with a group of experts, the researchers obtained a list of characteristics to recognize a creative SME. A case-study based research on internal factors that affect creative SME characteristics will follow.

This paper addresses the problem of manufacturing

Reporting

knowledge representation in manufacturing companies. An approach to characterize these knowledge is proposed. The solution is applied to the

Reporting

process at

STMicroelectronics

for capitalizing knowledge in the

Wiki

of the company and responding to users’ needs. In such an approach, the user participates throughout the knowledge representation definition process, even in choosing knowledge characteristics to represent it. For that aim, three dimensions are taken into consideration: the know

What

, the know

Why

and the know

How

.

Experimentalresearch data in the materials science domain is often insufficiently described with regard to metadata and frequently displays an incoherent form of documentation. These circumstances often hinder current and future researchers significantly in reuse and comprehension of data. To support researchers during the archiving and provision of materials science research data (incl. supplementing material), a Quality Management Manual (QMM) approach as an established QM tool is proposed in this paper. Quality-assurance of experimental research data and the perpetuation of good scientific practice in provision and archiving research data are examined before the QMM approach is applied in a case study. The preliminary results indicate that QMM allows to provide practitioners basic guidelines which support integrity, availability and reusability of experimental research data in materials science for subsequent reuse.

A company may face the international challenge by tackling several issues, such as international sales and marketing, international sourcing, and foreign direct investments (FDI). The academic literature firstly focused on the reasons behind company internationalisation and then adopted the above-mentioned issues related to the international challenge as perspectives in the investigation of the company internationalisation process. However, the literature review showed that the internationalisation process from a logistics perspective has not been fully investigated so far. Specifically, the relationship between company internationalisation choices and international logistics strategies has not adequately taken into account. This paper represents a first attempt to fill this gap by studying the relationship between the evolutionary stages of the company internationalisation and the key variables defining its international logistics strategy by providing empirical-based evidence.

Products generate a large amount of information during their lifecycles. Small and medium enterprises are often not structured enough to enable the efficient management of such amount of information. Several tools of product lifecycle management have been developed in the last years to address this issue, but they are rarely exploited by companies, especially SMEs. The aim of our work is to present a semantic platform to integrate data along the whole product lifecycle to allow semantic search and knowledge reuse. The integration of data is realized with a reference PLM ontology, containing the main concepts and relations to describe a PLM. This ontology has a modular structure, so that it can be easily extended to describe concrete product lifecycles. An example of a real application of the semantic platform in an industrial case is reported.

This article presents the first results of a study which deals with the detection and the correction of abnormal values in data series intended to forecast demand. This work fits in the broader context of performance management for proximity retailers. Indeed, when this kind of point of sales (POS) is studied, sales volumes are often too small to be effectively exploited by statistical processing methods. It is therefore useful to consolidate the information with expertise and additional knowledge resulting from similar POS. It is also relevant to take into account the inherent uncertainty of such information. The proposal of this paper is a methodological contribution which uses consolidated knowledge to detect and correct abnormal values and to improve the quality of data used to implement forecast methods.

This work presents the Paraconsistent Method of Prospective Scenarios (PMPS) in order to support organizations in their strategic planning, being a useful tool, as it serves a noble task. The method is based on non-classical logic, called the Paraconsistent Annotated Evidential Logic E

τ

(Logic E

τ

), this logic is excelling in the fields of research and it’s main characteristics are set by the thought of experts, generating input parameters and been consolidated by the collective way that translates into mathematical terms. Logic E

τ

is not trivial and has the capacity to manipulate imprecise and conflicting information.

Cyber-physical system platforms are information infrastructures connecting different cyber-physical systems and other information systems. This infrastructure is the base for realizing the “Industrie 4.0” paradigm aiming for collaborative industrial processes involving smart objects and smart factories. In inter-organizational value networks, a cyber-physical system platform becomes a shared resource that has to be managed cooperatively along its lifecycle. This paper looks at cyber-physical system platforms from a lifecycle perspective. It describes the complexity of networks of cyber-physical systems and cyber-physical system platforms within value networks and the resulting restrictions influencing their various lifecycles. A selection of different lifecycle models from literature is reviewed to extract aspects that provide a promising basis for the development of a specific lifecycle model of cyber-physical system platforms.

Association rule mining is a technique widely used in the field of data mining, which consists in discovering relationships and/or correlations between the attributes of a database. However, the method brings known problems among which the fact that a large number of association rules may be extracted, not all of them being relevant or interesting for the domain expert. In that context, we propose a practical, interactive and helpful guided approach to visualize, evaluate and compare the extracted rules following a step by step methodology, taking into account the interaction between the industrial domain expert and the data mining expert.

Ergonomics and the focus on human resources are widely accepted solutions to improve the performance of enterprises. Especially the influence of demographic change raises the relevance of such approaches. In the past years, different approaches were developed to realize those scientific solutions more efficiently. But which of those scientific approaches offers the optimal solution for enterprises in a turbulent market? To answer this question, this paper shows a state of the art review of different approaches of work systems. The main goal is to clarify the differences between the approaches and illustrate the academic void.

The IVTV Plan (Integration, Verification, Transition and Validation of the system before its Qualification) is developed and validated during the design stage. It details all the activities, resources, requirements, means, etc. requested during the realization stage so it is the hyphen between these two crucial stages in system life cycle. It is today necessary to help companies to better transfer detailed design models towards realization for many reasons discussed in this paper. Mainly, IVTV plan remains difficult to be exploited. This article proposes a first step towards a Model-Based Realization Plan, that is, a meta-model that represents the links between models that comes from Model-Based System Engineering and information required in the IVTV plan.

Design projects have evolved to be collaborative, concurrent and multi-disciplinary. Due to these changes, knowledge management for design projects faces new challenges, in order to represent all the elements in a collaborative design project, it is necessary to consider not only decision-making process, but also its context and interaction with other elements.

Informatics tools are very important for project development in the civil engineering area. CAD – Computer Aided Design - tools are freely used in different project routines, but BIM – Building Information Modeling are gaining space to allow the development of objects with a larger number of parameters and permit a collaborative engineering. Besides, the PBL - Project Based Learning – tools can be effective for teaching, allowing students to combine prior knowledge and aggregates skills in a collaborative model in engineering area. The objective of the paper is analyzing software applications in a PBL activity focusing the results of CAD and BIM tools utilization in project development. The methodology adopted was a technical review and a case study of 21 PBL projects developed by students of a civil engineering graduation course. The results shows that PBL is a good strategy for project development, and BIM tools are more efficient when compared with CAD tools.

IT has an important role in the performance of companies, provides a flow of information that makes the supply chain become more robust and resilient, without compromising efficiency. Most companies are applying IT systems, mainly in Supply Chain Management (Supply Chain Management - SCM) to enhance their performance in competitive global markets. The research is important because it will provide a study of what are the IT systems used to manage the supply chain and likely future trends. To achieve the objective of this work was carried out a survey with consultants and professionals in IT and supply chain who work in large companies. To collect the data needed for analysis, we used the exploratory research of a qualitative nature. Thus, we can conclude that the use of IT in the supply chain directly impacts in the areas of planning, manufacturing suppliers, customers and delivery.

This paper puts forward several evolutions in methodological approaches to « project management». Firstly, it aims to bring closer the founding models of different engineering approaches including systems engineering and project management recommendations to allow for a greater continuity and enhanced management coherence, from beginning to end of the project. It focuses on operating a generic process, called DECWAYS, based on handling management requirements: (1)analyze the requirements to arrive at a complete inventory of the final product ;(2)associate with each one of these requirements, an « indicator » setting a target objective for completion, supplemented by a risk function detailing the risk at hand based on the deviation relative to this target objective; (3) share and allocate the responsibility for requirements follow-up between the project team leaders; (4) organize and coordinate the follow-up of these indicators throughout the product development as proof of a good work management and,(5) finally, validate the total completion of the target objectives through the final prediction/completion conformity of these indicators. Based on this, several operational recommendations are explained and the practicality of DECWAYS embodying these principles is demonstrated using an experimental example for the design/planning of an electronic key.

The make or buy decision is a strategic issue. When looking for finding out which components or products should be manufactured or externalized then buy, capacity for human and technical resources at the workshop level as well as costs of the externalization are key questions to be answered. In the case of mobile manufacturing systems that are movable between various locations, long term strategic aspects must be considered when addressing the make or buy decision problem. This paper aims to provide a structured make or buy decision model, adapted for reconfigurable manufacturing systems with strong mobility constraints. An industrial application case is provided to illustrate the presented method.

Product recall is a challenge which may have a significant financial impact. Incidents should be anticipated to improve responsiveness and reduce potential harm. In this paper, we propose a product recall approach following the detection of a critical fault. It is applicable to foodstuffs industry characterized by complex processes with high variability, high-speed manufacture and very large lots sizes. In such a case, usual strategy which consists of recalling entire lots is expensive and does not foster continuous improvement. The proposed approach in this paper allow to identify root causes and other products likely to present the same noncompliance in order to make a targeted recall. The root causes are searched based on an analysis of traceability data using a Bayesian model. A data model suitable for product and process traceability is also proposed. The originality of our approach lies on the reconstitution of the conditions of manufacturing of each item through the coupling of product and process unitary traceability data.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of an information flow management (IFM) and to show a way how IFM can streamline business processes. First a definition of relevant terms is given. Then the paper demonstrates how IFM can be applied to an industrial case in order to streamline and support the business processes.

In the Factories of the Future framework, cutting-edge ICT developments have been accomplished by the industry, triggering new professional needs, which lead to new learning and training needs and new roles, especially regarding high-skilled labor force. Under this light, in this paper we define and analyze further the reasons triggering what is known as a “skills gap” in the world of European and global manufacturing, before reviewing applied solutions. Missing roles and related manufacturing skills, necessary for the development and progress of Factories of the Future, are then identified, based on surveys which reveal the voices of industrial stakeholders dispersed in the international market. The present analysis was conducted in the frame of the FP7 FoF project “ManuSkills”, which aims to study the use of enhanced ICT-based technologies and training methodologies to facilitate an increase of young talent interest in manufacturing and to support their training of new manufacturing skills.

Product Development (PD) management is changing through the emergence and implementation of agile principles into existing PD frameworks. This process changes PD governance assets, even though this aspect is not yet described in existing literature. Thus, this paper introduces PD governance of agile/stage-gate hybrid solutions through a comparative study including five case companies supported by a review of existing literature. The results include an overview of applied governance assets including which are supportive for PD management. The study indicates that only assets not part of corporate governance are affected by the introduction of agile, and that unaltered corporate assets affect PD performance of the hybrid solutions negatively.

The paper illustrates the role of modeling of shop floor to support an innovative solution for the control architecture of automated manufacturing systems. One of the main characteristics of manufacturing systems domain is, in fact, the variety of configurations that manufacturing systems can assume and this may prevent the possibility to easily adapt and reconfigure the control solution for advanced manufacturing systems. To this end, the paper presents a proposal on how to cope with this issue, coming from a collaborative project, where important European universities and companies are involved. The proposal is based on a structured modeling (i.e. ontology) of manufacturing systems. The paper proposes a practical example of the modeling, envisioning how this can be then exploited within the proposed architecture that defines a new concept of the Manufacturing Execution System of manufacturing equipment.

The product lifecycle management (PLM) system has a significant role to support the collaboration and manage the partnership between OEM and supplier to enable the success of supplier integration. Today great rates of cooperation as suppliers have been dedicated to SMEs.

Since one of the PLM task is to control the collaboration between OEM and suppliers, this paper provide supplier (SMEs) a framework to find their level of relationship with OEM and the steps that they can improve it. To respond to this trend, we defined a methodology based on collaborative matrix maturity levels and four PLM axes of strategic, organization, process and tools levels. Finally according to this matrix, we proposed a structure of a proper questionnaire and example that shows suppliers how to evaluate their positions in terms of collaboration in PLM.

Over the last decades, the Norwegian shipbuilding industry has become increasingly globalized, with offshoring of production of to low cost locations. Globally dispersed production of complex and customized ships has proven to be challenging with respect to coordination of activities and exchange of knowledge. The paper investigates how different governance alternatives affect knowledge exchange in the global value chains of two shipbuilding groups. The findings indicate that vertical integration facilitates coordination and knowledge transfer to foreign shipyards. However, reverse knowledge transfer through these linkages seems to be limited. This may have implications for the future innovativeness of this industry.

Companies today are struggling to cope with ever changing requirements arising from environmental concerns and increasing competition. Hence it is important to innovate, improve, and increase efficiency by achieving streamlined value chains. In this paper we examine both a single craft-oriented leisure boat producer and a car component mass producer to find similarities and differences with regard to operational integration in these two types of organizations. The study is based on interviews and field studies carried out at the production line. From this study several common enablers for integration are found: informal culture and little hierarchy, little distance between process steps and mutual rewards. The differences were found in degree of standardization and formalization, connecting links between departments and knowledge of overall and departmental strategy.

This paper presents a novel spatiotemporal ontology based on a mereotopological theory in the context of assembly-oriented design, which integrates assembly sequence planning in the early product design stages. Based on a brief literature review on ontology and existing spatiotemporal ontological models, the authors propose to go beyond by defining their own formal ontology in the domain of assembly-oriented design. The proposed ontology provides formal description of product-process information and information consistency checking through the product lifecycle. Here, the ontology covers the spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions. The ontology uses OWL language and is implemented in Prot´eg´e. The main objective is to provide a product design description by proactively considering its assembly sequence as early as possible in the product development so as to ensure information and knowledge consistency with preliminary information and later introduce a spatiotemporal reasoning layer.

The working relationship between industrial partners often begins with a bidding procedure by which a costumer chooses a provider of works or services. From the bidder point of view, there are several risks when responding because he must propose an offer for a future development. In this context, considering the whole project cycle is essential to identify all potential risks and take them into account during the development of the technical and commercial offer. In this paper, a methodology for bidding process risk management (BPRM) is presented. It is based on the experience acquired during past projects in order to manage the risks of current BP and make it more efficient.

Project management (PM) has become a managerial discipline which is an inevitable prerequisite of managing modern business organizations, especially manufacturing ones. When applied properly it helps organizations to cope with permanently changing environment predominantly represented by customers, suppliers, competitors, and public authorities. Development of the project management methodology leads to increasingly effective implementation of strategic changes which is fundamental for being competitive on the marketplace. This PM development is in the center of building project orientation of an organization. But, developing just PM without development of overall organizational culture leads to low effectiveness of projects implemented in the organization. That is why development of projects and project management should be supported by development systems and areas of activities such as communications, knowledge, training and development of employees, and development of organizational standards and norms. The article focuses on the area of communication by using Business Intelligence systems.

This paper introduces a novel modelling approach based on the analogy to the incubator concept so as to provide a suitable support for designers through product design process. The main objective is to define a knowledge-intensive design context in the early product design stages. The main goal of the proposed approach is to provide a knowledge-based design context for designers by considering engineering knowledge in an appropriate and seamless manner. As such, the proposed design incubator will assist designers to make better-informed decisions by delivering knowledge and engineering information at the right time. A case study has been introduce to illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach.

Small-to-medium ports are characterised with inefficient, ineffective and resource intensive information sharing, which is not supporting their complex and dynamic environment. This creates challenges both for optimizing the internal planning of the activities at the port according to the demand, and for stronger supply chain integration with the external actors. This paper focuses on identifying the needs and criteria for an information sharing system, and proposes an approach for sharing operational data in port systems for improved supply chain integration, in the context of logistic engineering. The proposed approach has the potential to alleviate some of the problems when operating in a dynamic demand environment.

With the advance of information systems and business intelligence technologies, new possibilities and functionalities to measure, monitor and control processes have emerged in the research area and in the market. In the context of PLM system, not only KPI for strategic goals can be measure and indicators for decision but also operational metrics link to product, project and process to manage agility of companies.

This study discusses logistical planning and handling activities contributing to food waste in the food distribution chain of chilled products with fixed shelf life and with an age dependent deterioration rate. The study has exploratory character and all the findings are based on the case study investigation from six Norwegian companies. The causes of food waste as identified in the case companies are grouped into four areas, namely planning decisions, data utilisation, execution of plan, and damaged products. Quantitative data indicates that for chilled products with fixed shelf life, logistical planning seems to have higher impact on financial losses from food waste than physical handling.

According to a widely shared view, manufacturing is currently un- dergoing its fourth industrial revolution, termed “Industrie 4.0” in the high-tech strategy of the German government. Smart Factories with vertically and hori- zontally integrated production systems are enabled through the realization of machines, storage systems and utilities as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are able to share information, act, and control each other autonomously. The development of CPS requires the collaboration of different disciplines, like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. This cre- ates new challenges for Requirements Engineering (RE), which needs to estab- lish a common perception of the targeted CPS for the involved stakeholders. This paper will elaborate the specific challenges in RE for CPS based on a lit- erature review. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used as an approach to automatically translate shared informal requirements specifications to formal domain specific models for the involved disciplines, to develop a comprehen- sive RE methodology for CPS.

One of the challenges to foster innovation is to understand the existing practices and the real needs to help companies when they initiate and develop innovative projects or new ideas. This paper addresses this question by proposing a new interactive and collaborative support based on the crowdsourcing approach. We pro- pose a collaborative wiki platform

WeKeyInnovation

(WKI), which will be used and enriched progressively by companies, consulting and institutional. To identify specific companies’ needs, we introduce how this guide has been developed promoting a collaborative environment to share and evaluate good practices, tools, software or theories about creativity and innovation. Furthermore, our WKI solution will allow building a dynamic observatory by collecting empirical and valuable ground data on their real practices and needs. The final purpose is to define most efficient policies and enhance the formulation of a real regional strategic plan toward an economical growth based on innovation.

The human response time to events in a manufacturing environment depends both on the available skills and competencies of technical staff but also on the extent to which actionable and task-relevant content is readily available when and where is needed. Relevance itself is determined by the task situation context, which in turn is influenced by many factors. This paper presents the development of a context-aware mobile support system for personalised assistance in industrial environments. Combining the individual strengths of learning and content management systems with the ubiquity of delivering relevant content to users carrying NFC (Near Field Communication) enabled mobile devices, the system aims at both enhancing personnel competences as well as their work efficiency. The developed solution is customised to serve an industrial maintenance-support application scenario, wherein the relevant context is determined through location and asset identification, as well as through task and user profiling, offering practical on the spot mobile support.

This contribution deals with issues regarding alarm management at the operator workstations of industrial automated systems. It is focused on the Object Oriented Programming techniques and data acquisition from controlled processes provided for the human machine interface of these systems, the possibilities to configure the monitored variables of the processes and their parameter definition. It shows the different aspects of decision making over the options for using system functions in applications of operator environments on concrete examples.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are sufficiently generic to propose models adapted to companies’ specific needs without additional development. However, the implementation of such systems and their multiple reconfigurations may introduce coherence problems. To ensure structural and functional coherence while creating and evolv- ing PLM models, a methodological approach is described in this paper. The proposed approach is based on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) principles in order to allow : [1] models’ creation while respecting syntac- tic and semantic constraints, [2] models’ evolution while respecting de- pendencies between the various PLM syste’ components. This approach is being prototyping based on Eclipse framework.

This paper proposes a modelling and formalizing approach to fieldwork-collected data in order to develop a set of tools to both direct and increase industrial production. The OCP (“Cherifian Office of Phosphate”) provided authentic data for the construction and use of an inductive approach. This approach enabled us not only to give details about the problems encountered but also to have the necessary level of granularity required for a number of ex ante management decisions. Several instances of the suggested modelling applications are given in the real context of the OCP’s supply chain reengineering. They equally allow the reader to obtain a feedback on the implementation of a twofold modelling generated by a unique collection of knowledge.

Risk based inspection analysis (RBIA) on offshore oil and gas (O&G) production systems optimize level of in-service inspection. The potential failure risk of a system, a sub-system or a thickness measurement location (TML) of O&G production systems comprise the consequence of failure (CoF) and probability of failure (PoF). A tailor-made risk matrix supports the estimation of maximum inspection intervals. When the inspection intervals are calculated using a risk matrix, suboptimal classification tends to occur as there are no means to incorporate actual circumstances at the boundary of the input ranges or at the levels of linguistic data and risk categories. This manuscript suggests a fuzzy inference system (FIS) to overcome the aforementioned. Membership functions and the rule base development have been carried out in alignment with a tailor-made risk matrix which has been utilized by a production plant owner operator organization. A rule view and a calculation result have been demonstrated to illustrate the methodology.

This article presents a multi-agent based algorithm for personnel scheduling and rescheduling in the dynamic environment of a paced multi-product assembly center. Our purpose is, on the one hand, to elaborate daily assignment of employees to workstations to minimize the operational costs as well as the personnel dissatisfactions and, on the other hand, to generate an alternative planning when the first solution has to be rescheduled due to disturbances related to operators’ absenteeism. The proposed approach considers the individual competencies, mobility and preferences of each employee, as well as the personnel and competency requirements associated with each assembly activity given both the current master assembly schedule and the line balancing for each product. To benchmark the performance of the multi-agent approach, we use solutions obtained through a simulated annealing algorithm. Experimental results show that our multi-agent approach can produce high-quality and efficient solutions in a short computational time.

This paper introduces i-DESME, an interdisciplinary framework for the design of IT scheduling Decision Support Systems in small-sized SME industrial environments. The proposed framework adopts a structured software engineering design approach, which has been suitably modified in order to explicitly identify and model the interdisciplinary characteristics that dictate the implementation of scheduling processes within an SME industrial environment. The framework aims to help practitioners design support systems which are not only effective, but are also being trusted and adopted for use by human schedulers. An overview of the framework’s application within the environment of a typical micro-sized food manufacturing company is provided.

We propose optimum arrangement of taxi drivers’ working hours. In Japan, income of taxi vehicle is decreasing about 11 thousand yen in the past 15 years. Then some taxi companies are investing to gain more customers. But there are many small taxi companies that are difficult to invest with much money. Therefore we have been researching the other method to gain more customers by little investment for small companies. In this paper, we analyze present situation of the Taxi Company which we research, research optimum arrangement of taxi drivers’ working hours so as to increase sales amount using mathematical model, and verify validity of our method with numerical calculation.

Supply chain management is concerned with decisions related to the physical perspective of the enterprise and how the flow of goods and services is arranged. A wide set of strategies have evolved over time to provide guidelines for the decision makers but many of these strategies share a common foundation in process management that is based on decoupling points and decoupling zones. The strategies concerned here are segmentation, leagility, customization, postponement, servitization, sustainability, outsourcing, and visibility.

The aim of this work consisted in applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) by considering the generic criteria and sub-criteria to select logistic operator to store and transport frozen products. The outcome of the AHP analysis is a preference priority for each alternative operator describing the expected performance level. Results pointed that the proposed model could be considered as a good alternative to this problem, thus contributing to achieve the goals of the organization.

Future production systems, if they want to remain competitive, need the capability to autonomously adapt to new challenges, to learn new behavior and to solve complex problems. This leads to a changing role of the employees as part of sociotechnical (production) systems, because it’s mainly their capability to cope with complex problem situations that determines the capabilities of the whole system. The paper presents a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to model and to design production systems from a problem solving perspective. The modelling architecture comprises of three interacting levels. Those are described in detail as well as the propositions which could be derived from the model and its parts.

As motivating and including people is a crucial aspect in any planning, design and change process there is always a need for appropriate methods and tools to support this. Lego Serious Play (LSP) is such a method which was developed to facilitate among others communication, creativity and shared mental models. In this paper the application of LSP is demonstrated for the case of re-designing a product development lifecycle process. With the case study we pursue a qualitative approach to seek for support that LSP is able to support team building and team decision processes, to avoid typical pitfalls of groupthink which will finally lead to solutions of higher quality, to efficient processes and to satisfied participants.

Differentiated planning is one of the means for today’s companies to accommodate the increasing needs for product variety, delivery responsiveness, and cost-efficiency. Even though, product segmentation is the foundation for such planning, planning nervousness has not yet been addressed from this perspective. This paper seeks to establish a relation between planning nervousness and segmentation by analyzing the current body of literature with the objective of identifying overlaps between the two areas. The literature characteristics are assessed and directions for future research are provided.

Previous research presents a theoretical relation between planning nervousness and product segmentation and indicates that the concept should be subject to further research. This paper seeks to empirically confirm this relation, by developing hypotheses and testing these on a specific case. Three hypotheses related to historical planning data, planning frequency, and demand variability are developed and tested using data from three-echelons in a case company. A key finding is a confirmation of the relationship, providing operational tools that can assist organizations in battling planning nervousness.

Considering a multi-echelon system, the bullwhip effect is recognized as a significant factor with regards to the inventory management. This paper focuses on the effect of stochastic dependent lead time on the bullwhip effect. Simulation based approach is used to quantify the bullwhip effect with different demand and lead time distributions. The experiment results show that the dependent lead time has much effect on the 2

nd

echelon (from the downstream to the upstream) and bullwhip effect decrease significantly if the variance of this echelon decreases.

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a change. Different future developments such as the increasing amount of biopharmaceutical products and even stricter regulations increase the need for a reliable long range warehouse capacity planning. Results from a literature analysis indicate that managing these operations will mainly remain the responsibility of the pharmaceutical company itself and may not be outsourced. Hence, the capabilities must be built up within the pharmaceutical companies itself, too. However, none of the models identified in the literature can fulfill all requirements of a reliable and detailed long-range planning process in the pharmaceutical industry. Providing suggestions for further research areas, the paper contributes to the further development of more reliable planning processes.

This paper proposes a methodology for analyzing lead time behavior. The method focuses on identifying whether lead times are in fact identically independently distributed (i.i.d.). The method uses a combination of time series analysis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov’s test for similar distributions and data sampling to arrive at its result. The method is applied to data obtained from a manufacturing company. The conclusions are that while the lead time to customers can for some products be assumed to be i.i.d. this is not uniformly true. Some products’ lead times are in fact neither independently nor identically distributed.

Process planning and scheduling are one of the most important functions to support flexible planning in a manufacture. The planning and scheduling should be solved simultaneously and not sequential for productivity improvements in manufacturing. In this paper, we propose an optimization tool based on genetic algorithm (GA) approach to help person in charge of process planning and scheduling to find the most promising sequence of operations considering a choice of machines on which to perform the operations. Minimizing makespan is the evaluation criteria.

In this paper, the considered system corresponds to a specific equipment proposed for leasing. This equipment is leased to several lessees who use it under various working conditions. The aims of this paper consist in determining optimal maintenance plans which minimize maintenance costs. Two maintenance policies are compared : systematic policy (imperfect preventive maintenance actions are performed, with the same effectiveness factor, after each mission) and “sporadic” policy (imperfect preventive maintenance action can be performed after a mission with its optimal effectiveness factor).

In this paper, we extend the general assembly line balancing problem by designing an integrated assembly line and addressing the number of workstations and simultaneous assignments of skilled and unskilled workers. We develop a mixed integer program that minimizes the sum of total annual workstation costs and annual salaries of skilled and unskilled workers within a predetermined cycle time. Because this problem is NP-hard, we also develop a genetic algorithm to obtain efficient solutions for large problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the random key-encoded genetic algorithm.

This paper deals with the problem of the joint optimization of the master production schedule and maintenance strategy for a manufacturing system. An efficient production planning and maintenance policy will allow to minimize the impacts of the potential random failures and will let the plan to be feasible. We present a modelisation where we take into account a feasibility constraint; the optimization problem is formulated as a linear program. We propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it and we show the impact of the feasibility constraint on different criteria.

In this study, an automated warehouse system with mixed loading is considered. The majority of previous studies considered assumptions that were similar to those for a single-shuttle system with single loading. Due to the increased number of items in recent years, storage assignment strategies with single loading are not feasible because of the shortage of storage racks. This study adopts a storage policy with mixed loading for an automated warehouse system, which enables the use of one warehouse. Additional movement and transshipment operations, which involve mixed loading, are considered in this paper.

The aim of the innovative Physical Internet (PI) paradigm-shifting initiative is to reverse the unsustainability situation existing in current logistic systems. In the Physical Internet, the efficient management of crossdocking hubs is a key enabler of quick and synchronized transfer of containers across interconnected logistics networks. The paper focuses on the distributed control of truck loading protocols in a rail-road crossdocking hub. It proposes grouping strategies for truck loading based on the exploitation of active containers. The grouping approach, the simulation platform and the obtained results are successively detailed.

This paper discusses an approach and a proposal of modeling socio-technical production systems. During the analysis and the development of new concepts the need for suitable representation methods emerged. Especially we had to grasp and document varied system aspects and make these aspects understandable for our project team. Surprisingly no standardized, uniform, comprehensive and especially quite complete system modeling standard exists up to the present day. The modeling frame which we developed and which is presented in this paper corresponds first of all to the approach of General System Theory after which complex socio-technical systems a) can be modeled in a hierarchical structure (called "subsystems") and b) aspect-wise (called "aspect systems"). Within the scope of the project we developed several aspect systems, as for example the formal organization, flow of information, knowledge network and social network.

The paper aims at investigating the industrial applicability of models for joint production and maintenance planning. Scientific community has paid attention to this issue for decades and more recently many researchers proposed models to optimize such kind of planning. Nevertheless each scientific work is based on its peculiarities and hypothesis, which might prevent the applicability within different industrial contexts. This is also due to the very theoretical roots of many models, often tested only within numeric or simulation scenarios. This paper aims at presenting a case study analysis where the industrial test-bench is analysed to understand how these types of model are adaptable and extendable to a real context. To support the case study analysis, the main literature on the topic is reviewed, with the purpose to provide the background for the model deployment and test within the selected industrial context.

The paper presents the results of an exploratory research based on 10 SMEs used as case studies with the purpose to observe the state of practices with regard to the integration of maintenance with production management. The research intends to provide an evaluation of the quality of integration by means of a maturity assessment method. The resulting evidences allow an initial concern on strengths and weaknesses of maintenance management and its relationship with production management in SMEs.

This paper proposes a multidisciplinary framework for robust planning and decision-making in dynamically changing engineering construction projects. The aim is to facilitate ’optimal’ levels and ’trade-offs’ between the major factors affecting decision-making throughout the project phases, to manage design changes and other disturbances, and to generate the maximum possible value. Offshore shipbuilding case analysis is applied to refine the model and to illustrate its value in decision-making.

This study aims to identify and assess critical factors influencing on the implementation of continuous improvement projects, specifically the TPM. This research is a quali-quanti study and collects data with managers who lead TPM implementation in the shop floor. In this perspective, the present work can contribute to production managers with an assessment of the critical factors that will assist in decision-making processes for implementing improvement projects and troubleshooting methods, more specifically based on the TPM and Autonomous Maintenance.

Recent development of computer network technologies is realizing highly-distributed manufacturing systems from the hardware point of view, where each facility is computerized and manages itself autonomously by communicating with other facilities. For this new type of manufacturing systems, a new discrete event simulation paradigm has been discussed, in which sorting of events is performed by exchanging messages about their occurrence times among the facilities. To make this paradigm beneficial enough, it is desirable that re-scheduling process performed after the simulation is carried out in a similar paradigm. We have developed some production scheduling methods for flexible flow-shop production of only one kind of products with just one stage. This paper presents an improved method which can be applied to flexible flow-shop of multiple kinds of products with multiple stages.

This paper presents an approach to production resource allocation. The approach is applied to a real-world problem within the construction equipment manufacturing industry. A multidimensional knapsack problem formulated; was the proposed model being based on an evolutionary algorithm using a three-dimensional binary-coded chromosome. Various tests were carried out to show the appropriateness of the solution. The experiment results suggest to be satisfactory from the manufacturing company perspective.

This paper explores human and organisational factors (HOFs) related to access and scheduling (A&S) of Healthcare services. Here human factors relate to the ‘processed’ (patients) as well as the ‘processors’ (people working in the operation). A ‘whole system perspective’ is taken to investigate how these influence outcomes. The analysis differentiates acceptable demand on the service from failure demand [1], where

failure demand

represents unnecessary demand placed on acute care (such as Accident and Emergency in hospitals) as well as primary care services. For eight General Practices in the UK, approaches to practice organisation, including A&S, are analysed to establish HOFs that influence service delivery and performance. Findings highlight HOFs affecting outcomes and ways in which A&S arrangements can be modified to improve them. These should inform the choice and management of effective A&S in a range of Health service scenarios, as well as for General Practices in the UK.

There is a lot of focus on intermodal transportation, maritime efficiency and port governance in the literature, but there is little regarding how to plan and coordinate activities in ports, especially in the context of small and medium sized ports. This paper will approach the planning tasks in port by using knowledge from the well-investigated field of planning and control in manufacturing and make use of the structure of strategic, tactical and operational planning, but relating this to the non-hierarchical setup found in most smaller ports. The paper finds that the general planning functions found in manufacturing planning and control can be applicable if approached as a way to align capacity and demand, and not focusing on the methods in the planning functions.

Efficient design of manufacturing networks is paramount for a sustainable growth. The establishment of mass customization and the transition to personalization complicates design activities and leads to vast amounts of unexploited data. This research work aims to exploit existing knowledge for enhancing decision-making during the initial manufacturing networks design, which carry out custom orders of industrial equipment. A method developed into software is proposed, comprising a Genetic Algorithm with knowledge-enriched operators and an intelligent initialization algorithm that exploits existing planning knowledge. The validation of the method is performed using data from a high-precision mold-making manufacturer and its network of first-tier suppliers.

The bin packing problem aims to pack a set of items in a minimum number of bins, with respect to the size of the items and capacity of the bins. This is an NP-hard problem. Several approach methods have been developed to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new encoding scheme which is used in a hybrid resolution: a metaheuristic is matched with a list algorithm (Next Fit, First Fit, Best Fit) to solve the bin packing problem. Any metaheuristic can be used but in this paper, our proposition is implemented on a single solution based metaheuristic (stochastic descent, simulated annealing, kangaroo algorithm). This hybrid method is tested on literature instances to ensure its good results.

A production network enables a company to develop capabilities to respond to diversity in national or regional demand, while at the same time integrate and coordinate their activities. Many companies have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to overcome problems associated with coordination and planning in an organization, in recent years. In addition, advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems have emerged to address the planning insufficiencies of ERP systems. However, due to complexity and competence dependency of these systems, advantages of them are overlooked by large organizations, and therefore ERP systems are still in use for planning. ERP systems are used in production networks for coordination of various plans and decisions across network partners. This paper aims to assess the fit and alignment between ERP functions and production network requirement for supporting production planning processes. Using a case study approach, the paper illustrates and discusses the applicability of ERP systems for planning in production networks. The case study showed that ERP systems have limited ability in coordinating order allocation in the network, detailed short term production planning and inter network distributions. It is concluded that use of ERP systems for network planning may in fact limit the network’s ability to reap the full benefits associated with planning across several facilities in a network.

The production planning and control process is performed within complex and dynamic organizations made up of equipment, people, information, IT systems, and influenced by a multitude of external factors. How to effectively schedule in uncertain and complex manufacturing environments, still remains a central question to academics and practitioners. In this paper, we propose a framework that can be utilized to design/enhance decision support systems for scheduling activities in complex and uncertain manufacturing environments. The framework is based on the analysis of the relevant literature that addressed human, organizational, and technological aspects of the production planning and scheduling.

This article proposes a method for dynamically rebalance an assembly line when disturbances occur, by reassigning the tasks to the line’s workstations. The method is based on reachability analysis of an automata network that represents the tasks and workstations to be performed. The execution trace leading to the desired state provides one feasible solution to rebalance the assembly line. The method is illustrated by an industrial case study.