Intelligent Process Planning for Smart Factory and Smart Manufacturing

The goal of the Industry 4.0 is the Smart factory which provides flexible and adaptive production processes in complex production conditions. Smart factory is a solution for manufacturing conditions that have hyper-dynamic character and are rapidly changing. The automation and constant optimization of production are inevitable and enable maximal utilization of workforce and production resources. The main task of technologies and services within the Smart factory is the implementation of artificial intelligence in all aspects of production. In this way, the smart manufacturing is achieved where the tasks are focused on finding optimal solutions in the preparation of production as well as the prediction of errors before they occur in production stages. Smart manufacturing relies on the concept of Cloud manufacturing in which different services are based on artificial intelligence. Smart services utilize various intelligent tools such as nature-inspired metaheuristics, search algorithms whose implementation in manufacturing has grown in the recent period. In this paper, three modern nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms will be briefly introduced as an efficient tool in intelligent process planning optimization and their performance will be presented on three experimental studies.