This Special Issue of International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (IJCIM) on Methods, Tools and Models for Dynamic Manufacturing Environments is from the selected papers presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Supply Chain Management and Information Systems (SCMIS2004), hosted by the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 7–9 July 2004 in Hong Kong. This workshop was jointly organized by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University of Cambridge (UK), Taiwan Lan Yang Institute of Technology, University of Sheffield (UK), and University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (USA). This workshop was sponsored by Taylor and Francis Group, Emerald Publishing Group, Group Sense (International) Ltd, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, L.K. Machinery Co Ltd, and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
The aim of this special issue is to present the various tools and techniques for the design and operations of dynamic manufacturing systems. Static and deterministic rules do not apply in today's increasingly uncertain manufacturing environments. This has direct impact on the development and relevance of tools and techniques, which are required to be responsive to such environments. Those tools and techniques must be adaptable to evolving and changing settings with high agility. Past research in this area is mainly focused on the development perspective, but little on the issue of implementation and operation of the tools and techniques in real life environments, and how these can be used across different manufacturing enterprises. Past tools and techniques such as inventory control model, transportation model, and production planning and scheduling system amongst others are rigid in nature and hence they require suitable modification in order to be able to perform well in dynamic manufacturing environments. Considering this, new paradigms and contemporary approaches are required to add into and complement the past tools and techniques.
This Special Issue contains eight papers discussing a range of advanced and contemporary methods, tools and models for dynamic manufacturing environments. A mix of theory building and empirical study papers that have strong relevance to the practical world are available. These papers were originally selected from SCMIS2004 based on their quality and suitability to this issue. The normal IJCIM review guidelines were followed. We provide a brief overview of the papers, which appear in this issue.
Tan, Lim, Platts and Koay in their paper, ‘Managing manufacturing technology investments: an intelligent learning system approach’ propose an intelligent decision support system for managing manufacturing technology investments. Their intelligent system is a hybrid integration of two information processing modules: Case Based Reasoning and Fuzzy ARTMAP - a supervised Adaptive Resonance Theory neural network with a multi-dimensional map. The developed system captures a company's strategic information, provides facilities to quantify qualitative attributes, and analyse them alongside the quantitative attributes in an evaluation framework. They claim that, through the system, similar cases can be retrieved to enable managers to make effective use of their knowledge and experience of previously delivered technologies and projects as an input to the prioritization of future projects. The applicability of the proposed system has been studied in a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm.
The paper, ‘Knowledge-based simulation and analysis of supply chain performance’, by Chan, Cheung, Lee and Kwok argues that although various supply chain strategies such as Vendor Managed Inventory are used for keeping low inventory and reducing cost in supply chain management, most enterprises are lacking in integrated simulation system to mimic the behaviour and performance of supply chain partners so as to select the appropriate strategy for implementation. They present a knowledge-based simulation approach for simulating the effect of downstream and upstream operations in supply chain. They claim that with the use of Artificial Intelligent techniques, the Knowledge-Based Simulation Platform could accumulate the successful experience of the enterprises in formulating and implementing supply chain strategies.
Holm in his paper, ‘Information structures for design of feedback resource distribution control systems for discrete part manufacture’ notes that increased pressure for efficiency improvement on discrete part manufacture justifies investment in design and implementation of control systems for distribution of resources in a manufacturing plant. A systematic method for the design of such control systems is described. He presents the generic structure of such control systems including definition of input, state and output vectors, and defines the set of events, which cause choice of input and corresponding transition from one state into another one. In addition, he presents a method for identification and representation of the degrees of freedom, which are available for the choice of system input in reaction to valid classes of appearing production events, and the structure of the state space of the control system and the principle according to which it is expanded and searched for optimal control input.
The paper, ‘A case on reengineering the work order system in a container shipping company’, by Chung and Lau examines the application of a knowledge-based work order system to enhance the maintenance capability of inventory management using a case study of an international shipping company. They explain that the case company has to maintain a stable supply of containers in order to meet spontaneous shipment demand. Regional maintenance and repair team (M&R) is responsible for the control of technical requirement and repair standard of containers. Regional M&R office uses contract survey service if it has a query on repair request. They argue that the traditional way of approving repair request by using fax and telephone has resulted in increased paper work. Such information lag has an adverse effect on container readiness. They conclude that through building of a communication platform, the company can gain knowledge of different trading parties in order to make better forecasts and strategic plans.
Loh, Koh and Simpson in their paper, ‘An investigation of the value of becoming an extended enterprise’ study the value of a new form of enterprise, namely the extended enterprise in the new economy. To become an extended enterprise, an enterprise with a traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system will need to upgrade or modify the existing system, and/or to introduce Extended Enterprise Applications (EEA) into the system. This leads to the investigation on the potential benefits of using EEA. Their interviews with EEA and ERP vendors and users suggest that manual operational tasks will be automatically managed by the EEA and the system will even warn the enterprise if certain events did not occur or need to occur. They found that as supply chains become more integrated and business processes are automated, the supply chain would require less day-to-day management. Their results also show that the supply chain will be driven to manage exceptions and the system will handle much of the ‘traditional operations’. Their overall conclusion is that the use of EEA is expected to increase the supply chain information velocity, greater product customization, lower cost of doing business, and appear to be worth pursuing but with some highlighted concerns that are equally worth considering.
The paper, ‘A case study: using UML to develop a knowledge-based system for supporting business systems in a small financial institute’, by Chung and Pak discusses the experiment of using Unified Modelling Language (UML) in developing a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for supporting business systems at the front, mid and back office in a financial institute. The rationale for their research is to apply theory in practice, because it is clear from the literature that the use of UML is feasible in knowledge acquisition, but case study on this respect is limited. The way of using UML diagrams is documented throughout the study. They found that UML is useful in different stages of KBS development. The case study articulates how the KBS help to solve business system problems in the company.
Ho, Lee, Lau and Ip in their paper, ‘A hybrid intelligent system to enhance logistics workflow: an OLAP based GA approach’ propose a new approach, namely the Logistics Workflow Optimiser (LWO), which embraces the combination of On-Line Analytical Processing and Genetic Algorithm in order to provide decision support for different logistics activities within a supply chain. Extensible Mark-up Language is incorporated to support the overall infrastructure, thereby providing essential supports for enterprise integration. Their results demonstrate the benefits of using two computational intelligence techniques to form an integrated model for the transformation of clusters of data into organized information as to achieve knowledge discovery within the supply chain. In addition, their approach is capable of achieving process optimization and provides decision support in the area of supplier selection. To validate the feasibility of the Internet-based LWO, they implement the prototype in an electronic industry and apply the approach to business partner selection.
The paper, ‘Manufacturing network for rapid tool/die making’, by Tu and Kam presents a manufacturing network, which has been developed on the Internet, for rapid tool/die making. This manufacturing network functions like an e-technical-broker, which is able to automatically fill the gap between tool/die users and tool/die makers. Their e-manufacturing network is supported by four basic novel Computer Aided Engineering and Internet communication management technologies: Intelligent searching agent, customer interface, Internet-based and Computer Aided Design (CAD) model and a global production planning and reasoning platform. In this paper, they focus their discussions on the Intelligent searching agent and Internet-based and CAD model. They propose a new agent search method, which allows users to submit queries through user interface and provide the users a manufacturing scheme, which includes manufacturability, competitiveness and a CAD drawing of a similar tool/die made in the past by a tool/die making company. They present an Internet-based and CAD method to support adaptive and concurrent tool/die making process.
We could not have done this by ourselves and we totally appreciate the efforts and support of all who were involved in making this special issue possible, which includes the authors, referees, editorial staff of International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing and the editor of the journal. The guest editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by the editor of International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing and the referees who reviewed the manuscripts for this special issue.