As the world is now all connected economically, technically, and socially, manufacturers must aggregate products and services into customer solutions by implementing integrated manufacturing enterprises, ensuring their manufacturing services meeting the challenges characterised by customisation, integration, intelligence, and globalisation.
This special issue of International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing contains selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM 2007). FAIM 2007 continued its tradition by focusing on state-of-the-art research, best practices and future trends within the areas of regional and global manufacturing competitiveness, and rapidly advancing technologies in flexible automation and intelligent manufacturing. The selected papers present new research findings in numerous hot manufacturing areas, spanning from product design, shop floor operations design and scheduling, and collaborating manufacturing, to environmentally aware manufacturing.
Product requirements and design is confronted with more challenges than ever before. The very first step in successful product design and development is requirements gathering. Eliciting precise and comprehensive product requirements from customers plays a critical role in the process of requirements gathering. Wang and Zeng developed a generic process for eliciting product requirements based on linguistic analysis. The proposed process essentially focuses on asking customers appropriate questions. By utilising recursive object model that transforms a text into a graphic language through linguistic analysis, Wang and Zeng developed two algorithms: one used to generate generic questions and the other used to generate domain specific questions. A software prototype was developed based on the proposed methodology. A case study of a rivet-setting tool design was used to confirm its practical applicability. To retain the optimum balance between product commonality and differentiability for meeting the needs of mass customsation, Li and Huang then articulated that manufacturing enterprises should have a family of product variants. By formulating product family design as a multiobjective optimisation problem, Li and Huang successfully proposed a new method to assess multilevel commonality at the product, module, component and even parameter levels while retaining designated modularity. The proposed multiobjective evolutionary algorithm ensures the necessary balance between product commonality and differentiability.
Effective production process design and scheduling entails better efficiency on the shop floor. Although just-in-time system and operational philosophy has been used in many competitive manufacturing facilities worldwide, it is not easy to have it successfully implemented if the manufacturing settings keep changing. As kanban systems show more promising outcomes in managing inventory control and market changes, Iannone, Miranda, and Riemma studied the problem of choosing the optimal number of kanbans in a multi-stage productive environment when the production took an assembly-tree layout. They developed a heuristic procedure to determine the optimal number of kanbans in dealing with the frequent change of production needs, which indeed showed the realisation of better performance on the shop floor. To ensure the scheduled production accommodating the changing production environment, Weigert and Henlich proposed a Timed AND/OR-graph approach to modelling assembly processes on the shop floor. The created simulation-based scheduling system for assembly processes was able to help optimise assembly operations on the shop floor.
Collaborative manufacturing aims at leveraging the best-of-breed global resources in an integrated and collaborated way for competitive advantage. The objectives of collaborative manufacturing research are to find best practices of streamlining end-to-end business and supply chain processes and providing a more comprehensive and accurate information base from which informed decisions can be made. Wang developed an integrated system that mainly focused on collaborated manufacturing planning and control by fully taking advantage of web technologies. Wang presented an approach to enhancing web-based knowledge sharing, distributed process planning, dynamic scheduling, real-time monitoring and remote control, targeting distributed yet collaborative manufacturing environments. Chuang, Yang, and Lin then showed an operational strategy for effectively selecting a new production technology by taking into account the market trends, operational strategies and manufacturing attributes using the relationship matrix in the well-developed quality function deployment method. As insufficient capacity gradually leads to deteriorating business performance, Yuan and Ashayeri successfully explored a set of control theory simulation experiments. Their studies show that control-theoretic models are capable of identifying those factors that play a key role in supply chain capacity expansion decisions.
Competitive manufacturing enterprises are responsible for the global environmental impact of the products they produce, embracing innovative process technologies of generating very little waste. One such innovative process is to reuse and recycle obsolete products. Grochowski and Tang proposed a machine learning approach to designing the disassembly processes of a product based on a disassembly Petri net and a hybrid Bayesian network. By examining the probabilistic relationships between the different aspects of various disassembly processes, the developed approach can better predict the outcome of each disassembly action, resulting in a series of optimal disassembly processes for minimising the environmentally adverse effect of waste.
The Editor of this special issue would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors for the time and effort they spent in contributing to the manufacturing research community. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose peer reviews helped retain the high quality of the special issue. Finally, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the trust, support, and assistance provided by Prof. William Sullivan and Prof. Munir Ahmad, founders of the FAIM conference series, and Prof. Stephen Newman, the Editor-in-chief of IJCIM, in the process of compiling this special issue.
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