Many changes are witnessed in today's manufacturing environment as companies strive to be competitive and profitable in a fluctuating market characterised by changing demands, increasing products variation and new global business strategies. A host of change drivers exist and affect the manufacturing companies at various levels from strategic enterprise positioning to the design, planning and operation of the physical production facilities to achieve a high degree of adaptability.
This manufacturing environment requires new change enablers and technological solutions that would help industry not only cope with changes but also profit from them. Contributions in this special issue focus on logical (soft) enablers, at the products design, process planning, production planning and customer order processing levels, which are aimed at mitigating the effects of experienced changes in the manufacturing environment.
This special issue of IJCIM is based on a selected sample of the many notable research papers that were presented at the second international conference on changeable, agile, reconfigurable and virtual production (CARV) in July 2007. The selected papers were expanded and peer-reviewed. The CARV'07 conference was sponsored by the International Academy for Production Engineering Research (CIRP), and took place in Toronto, Canada. The CARV conference is a forum for presenting the latest developments and emerging technologies and discussing leading edge research directions in this fast evolving manufacturing field including current flexible manufacturing or future reconfigurable manufacturing and virtual production. The CARV'09 conference will be held from 5–7 October 2009 in Munich, Germany (Website: www.carv-production.com).
The first contribution deals with the effect of the increased product diversification, market changes and service outsourcing that are making manufacturing processes complicated, especially in job shop operations, with a particular focus on production planning and control. It presents an adaptive approach to dynamic set-up dispatching and execution monitoring by applying function block technology to enable companies to produce profitably in small quantities and make frequent product changeovers to meet customers' needs in order to stay competitive in the global market.
Process planning in a changeable manufacturing environment, where product features changes are frequent, attracted attention recently and new methods for reconfiguring process plans as needed and when needed have been introduced. Process planning literature traditionally focused on metal removal applications. Products inspection is an important function that is also affected by the changes in products and the ever-increasing tendency to include complex shapes and geometries owing to advances in manufacturing technologies and the availability of new materials.
The second paper presents an intelligent feature-based planning system for the hybrid inspection of complex parts that optimally uses contact and/or non-contact sensors as warranted by the geometric characteristics and functional requirements expressed by geometric dimensional and tolerancing specifications. This makes the inspection tasks more adaptable and responsive to changes in products while reducing the inspection time and cost and increasing its efficiency in a changeable manufacturing environment.
The third paper presents an application of process planning for flame cutting of sheet metals. An automated optimal layout and path planning system that can respond quickly to changes in the design of sheet metal products is another enabler of change in the non-traditional process planning of flame sheet metal cutting. The presented algorithms reduce the process time and cost and increase agility and adaptability to changes in products shapes.
The fourth contribution emphasises the importance of making all phases of products design and manufacture responsive to anticipated and unpredictable changes. It focuses on implementing a structured agile strategy in product design based on product modularity and the integration of computer-aided design (CAD) tools to allow the concurrent management of possible changes in both product and process platforms and assessing their feasibility using virtual prototypes and simulations.
The customisation of both products and production systems present many challenges in their design and systems operation as well as their ability to remain both adaptive and competitive.
The fifth paper discusses the main requirements posed by customised mass production and managing networks that produce consumer goods in large quantities and variability with emphasis on their real-time cooperative behaviour and performance. An integrated approach is outlined for planning and scheduling the behaviour of the system at network-, factory- and plant-levels, as well as for adapting the various plans and schedules to real execution conditions.
The last paper examines the offer specification process for customised products aimed at capturing larger market segments where speedy processing of customer orders is important in order to maximise responsiveness and customer satisfaction. It emphasises establishing computerised integration of customer order processing for individualised products as a regular business process to optimise offer specification for customised products.
The articles featured in this issue deal with the challenges of designing, planning, operating, controlling and managing manufacturing systems in a dynamic and changing environment.
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