The CIRP-Sponsored International Conference of Digital Enterprise Technology (DET2009) was held on 14–16 December 2009 at The University of Hong Kong. This international conference series of Digital Enterprise Technology aims to provide a forum for academia and industrialists to disseminate, to all branches industries and businesses, information and knowledge on the most recent and relevant innovations, theories and practices in electronic business and digital enterprise technology. This special issue is based on contributions carefully reviewed and extended from the Proceedings of DET2009 on the topic of Enterprise Informatics. Enterprise Informatics deals with the optimal use of enterprise-level information and knowledge to support decision-making processes and/or day-to-day operations. Eleven papers were eventually selected out of over 130 DET2009 contributions. They cover a set of issues concerning some important research and application developments of enterprise informatics technologies, forming the broad basis of research agenda to identify and explore the ways in which users and their actions can be facilitated.
The issue begins with a paper entitled ‘Planning towards enhanced adaptability in digital manufacturing’ by Wang. The paper presents an integrated approach for developing a web-based system with enhanced adaptability, including distributed process planning, real-time monitoring and remote machining. This approach is enabled by a Wise-ShopFloor (Web-based integrated sensor-driven e-ShopFloor) framework targeting distributed yet collaborative manufacturing environments. It allows end-users to plan and control distant manufacturing operations based on runtime information from shop floors. An example of distributed process planning for remote machining is chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach towards web-based digital manufacturing.
Bottlenecks, as the key ingredients for improving the performances of the production networks, have been profoundly studied. However, the major definitions of bottlenecks are derived in terms of the throughput and based on the Theory of Constraints (TOC). In the paper ‘Modelling dynamic bottlenecks in production networks’, Scholz-Reiter et al. develop a systematic and comprehensive definition of dynamic bottlenecks of the production networks based on both the TOC and the Bottleneck Oriented Logistic Analysis (BOLA). Distinguishing from the traditional view at the bottlenecks, the defined dynamic bottlenecks are modelled by means of discrete simulation using practical data, aimed at visualising them in the production network. By applying the logistic operating curves (LOCs), the practical application of the proposed research and its procedures is discussed in detail.
Multi-material products are getting increasingly popular in recent years. However, no systems have been developed to support the design of such products. In the paper ‘A haptic-based part decomposition method for multi-material product design’, Chen et al. propose a haptic-based method for designing multi-material products. This approach consists of three main parts: haptic painting/marking, boundary smoothing/fitting and volume decomposition. The haptic device provides an intuitive user interface for quick volume mark up in a multi-material product by direct mesh painting. Based on the boundaries of painted regions, volume decomposition can be done automatically when needed. The numerous iterations of volume mark up and decomposition in the early stage of multi-material product design can now be made easy and effective with the proposed method.
The paper ‘Optimal service selection and composition for service-oriented manufacturing network’, by Huang et al. presents the service management of service-oriented manufacturing network (SOMN). It considers the key problem, the optimisation of service selection and composition, to realise the integration and optimisation of services in an open environment which contains large amounts randomicity and uncertainty. The integrated performance evaluation metrics for SOMN is described, which combines the key performance indicators of services from business, service and implementation level. The performance evaluation model is brought forward to analyse the local and global performance. An uncertainty and genetic algorithm-based method is developed to realise the optimisation of service selection and composition in an effective and efficient way.
Zhang et al. introduce ‘Real-time work-in-progress management for smart object enabled ubiquitous shop floor environment’. This paper proposes a work-in-progress (WIP) management framework for a ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) environment. Under the framework, two types of services and a WIPA (work-in-progress agent) are designed and developed. To implement the integration of heterogeneous Enterprise Information Systems (EISs), the wipML (work-in-progress markup language) is established based on some important standards such as ISA 95 and B2MML. During production execution, real-time visibility explorers are provided for operators and supervisors to reflect the real-time situation of current manufacturing environment. The presented framework is studied and demonstrated using a near real-life simplified shop floor that consists of typical manufacturing objects.
In view of the seamless integration of products, production systems and business processes, the paper ‘Framework for extended digital manufacturing systems’ by Nylund et al. deals with their work on building up a framework of EDMS – Extended Digital Manufacturing Systems. A reference model of EDMS is presented that consists of manufacturing entities with different roles and similar structures. EDMS provides an integrated environment for products, production systems and business processes. The theoretical application areas of the past, present and future and the process from ideas to innovative solutions are described. A real-life example of an intelligent manufacturing environment is introduced to demonstrate manufacturing development, operation, performance monitoring and measurement, etc. of the EDMS framework.
Production service system (PnSS) is a new business mode where a manufacturer obtains manufacturing resources in the form of continuous production services instead of resource entities. In the paper ‘Analytical target cascading enabled optimal configuration platform for production service systems’, Qu et al. focus on the configuration platform of the PnSS business mode. A systematic PnSS configuration methodology and the enabling platform are developed based on a newly extended Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) method. As ATC accommodates heterogeneous sub-system integration and multi-level problem solving, the methodology is able to address the typical challenges that a practical component service PnSS configuration process normally faces, such as distributed decision rights, uncertain decision structure and short decision period.
In the paper ‘A hierarchical deployment of distributed PLM system in collaborative product development’, Chu et al. propose a novel methodology of distributed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform deployment. It incorporates information technologies to support collaborative product development in a global enterprise with multiple distributed sites. The operational guidelines are provided for determining the hardware configuration integrated from the analysis of the organisational, data, content and application views of the requirements of the enterprise. A customised deployment plan that reflects the actual user needs is then generated to construct a cost-effective collaborative PLM platform. Finally, a case study is included to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology.
One of the most difficult problems in mobile robot navigation is the acurate estimation of the robot's position and orientation. In the paper entitled `High accuracy mobile robot positioning using external large volume metrology instruments', Wang et al. present a method of accurately controlling the position of a mobile robot using an external Large Volume Metrology (LVM) instrument such as the laser tracker, a navigation algorithm, and a low cost robot, a repeatability of 5 mm could be achieved over a volume of 30 m radius. In addition, a surface digitisation scan of a wind turbine blade section is also demonstrated, illustrating possible applications of the proposed method for manufacturing processes.
The ‘near-zero inventory production’ and ‘real-time delivery’ is becoming a powerful solution to reduce the inventory cost and improve the production efficiency and benefits for enterprises. The paper ‘A RFID-based optimal material delivery for digital plant production’ by Zhou et al. uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to develop a real-time optimal material delivery method. A mathematical model for dynamically obtaining the optimal routes for forklifts is established by taking the minimal travel distance as the objective. Then, an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO)-based real-time optimum route planning algorithm is designed to solve the material delivery problem. The feasibility of presented model and algorithm is validated by a case study.
Evolvable systems has been developed and tested as a next-generation production system paradigm since its inception in 2002. The paper entitled `Evolvable systems: an approach to self-X production' by Onori et al. presents current developments and applications of Evolvable Product Systems (EPS). It has been pointed out that the essence of evoluability resides not only in the ability of system components to adapt to the changing operational conditions, but also in the evolution of these components over time such that processes may become self-X, where X stands for one or more desirable system properties such as self evolvable, self reconfigurable, self-tuning, self-diagnosing etc. The core approaches and techniques of EPS have been discussed in detail.
The guest editors would like to thank all the authors for the time and effort in contributing their papers and in incorporating the referees' comments in revising their manuscripts. Thanks are especially extended to the referees in giving their valuable comments to the papers. The guest editors are grateful to Springer, the publisher of DET2009 Proceedings, for giving permission to extend the papers for this special issue. Finally, the guest editors would like to express their thanks to Professor Stephen Newman (Editor-in-Chief) and the Journal Office for their advice and support that made this special issue project a success.