Event-driven multi-agent ubiquitous manufacturing execution platform for shop floor work-in-progress management

Abstract

It has been reported that radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is applied to manufacturing shop floors for capturing and collecting real-time field data. Real-time information visibility and traceability allows decision makers to make better-informed shop floor decisions. It has been a great challenge to process a huge amount of RFID data into useful information for managerial uses. This paper presents an event-driven shop floor work-in-progress (WIP) management platform for creating a ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) environment. The platform aims to monitor and control dynamic production and material handling through RFID-enabled traceability and visibility of shop floor manufacturing processes. The platform provides facilities to process shop floor real-time RFID events and to aggregate actionable and meaningful operational information to support decision-making activities. An information processing mechanism based on a critical event model is proposed to organise real-time field data in various abstract levels for enterprise decisions. A case study at an air conditioner manufacturing company is used to demonstrate how the proposed platform can benefit its shop floor WIP management by showing how production and logistic operators and their supervisors accomplish their tasks.

Keywords:

• RFID
• event processing
• manufacturing execution system (MES)
• WIP management
• multi-agent
• case study

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to various companies and organisations which have provided technical and financial support for this research. The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Guangdong Department of Science and Technology (2010B050100023, 2010B050400005), the Industry-University-Research Cooperation Key Project of Ministry of Education of Guangdong (20100901, 2011B090400409), HKSAR RGC GRF and HKU Research Committee Projects, the National Science Foundation of China (51105081) and the Guangzhou Science and Technology Planning Project (2011J2200017).