Special Issue on Collaborative Manufacturing and Supply Chains

Advanced manufacturing systems are evolving towards a more agile environment that can make quick responses to the changing market demands and customer requirements. A company that handled almost all aspects of business activities previously needs to shift its focus on its core competencies, while depending on other firms to provide the complementary expertise and resources. The challenges facing the manufacturing enterprises are directly related to the utilisation of advanced information and communication technologies. These technologies provide a consistent set of solutions to support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of information throughout the entire product lifecycle and over supply chains, and further to integrate people, processes, business systems, and information more effectively.

This special issue is based on the papers selected from the 2010 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD 2010) and the related special sessions at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (IEEE SMC 2010). Both the CSCWD 2010 conference and the IEEE SMC 2010 special sessions on Collaborative Manufacturing and Supply Chains were organised by the IEEE SMC CSCWD Technical Committee which focuses on collaboration technologies as well as their applications to collaborative design, manufacturing, construction, other businesses and industries.

The nine papers included in the special issue address some of the challenges and issues on Collaborative Manufacturing and Supply Chains from different perspectives. These papers can be classified into four small groups: two papers addressing enterprise interoperability and product data exchange; two papers presenting collaborative design or collaborative product development (CPD) platforms; two papers focusing on collaborative resource allocation and optimisation in product design and manufacturing; and three papers related to collaboration and optimisation over supply chains.

The first paper by Jardim-Goncalves et al. introduces a conceptual reference model for the sustainability of systems interoperability in networked enterprises. The proposed approach was inspired by the principles of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that enables enterprise systems to deal with network dynamics and interoperability disruptions. A CAS-based sustainable interoperability framework (CAS-SIF) was proposed for use in dynamic networks to capture environmental knowledge and relate human choices and preferences, using monitoring, feedback, and decision support. The second paper by Li et al. presents a procedure recovery-based solution for Feature-based data exchange (FBDE) among CAD systems. The proposed solution is quite unique in that it uses the peer-to-peer architecture and recovers the feature modelling procedure in the source CAD system. It consists of three key steps: first-order feature information retrieval, second-order feature information retrieval, and feature model reconstruction.

The third paper by Wang et al. proposes an agent-based collaborative design framework to facilitate the collaboration of feature-based aircraft structural parts design and analysis tools, including detailed design, machining feature recognition, feature-based manufacturability evaluation and cost estimation. Using machining features as the carrier of process knowledge, manufacturability evaluation and cost estimation can be done throughout the entire design process, so as to reduce iterations and shorten the lead-time and ultimately reduce the cost of new aircraft product development. The fourth paper by Sun et al. describes a hierarchical federated integration architecture for heterogeneous information systems. Under the proposed architecture, cooperative individuals are the projections of real subsystems in a given application domain. The control scope of subsystems and the management scope of collaboration can be different in order to avoid exploring too many details about the subsystems and to maintain their independency. The owners of subsystems can fully control their own subsystems and share their resources. The hierarchical collaborations are achieved by introducing the concepts of system federation and application federation, which address the collaboration issues at the physical level and the logical level separately.

The fifth paper by Zhang et al. discusses the modelling of the designer's autonomous task scheduling behaviour and uses it in an agent-based product development process simulation. In the proposed approach, a utility function is constructed, in which task urgency, task importance, agent individual preference, and recovery cost are considered. Comparative simulation experiments are used to validate the scheduling behaviour based on utility functions in agent-based simulation. The sixth paper by Zhang and Li proposes a Quantum-inspired Iterated Greedy (QIG) algorithm for permutation flow-shops in order to address difficulties with uncertainties in a collaborative manufacturing environment. A hybrid representation is developed to construct a Q-job by combining a job with a Q-bit. Q-job permutations represent solutions, which can be evaluated directly, so that no representation conversion is needed and the efficiency is enhanced. Furthermore, a new rotation gate based on Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) is proposed to dynamically update Q-bits so that the perturbation strength is modified adaptively.

The seventh paper by Trappey et al. takes an economic input-output life cycle assessment approach to evaluate the carbon emissions of new products. The proposed approach identifies problematic carbon emissions within the supply chain. Based on the input and output data, it applies system dynamics modelling to simulate and identify green product re-designs with cost-effective carbon footprints during manufacturing. The proposed methodology is demonstrated through a case study with an electronic image projector. The eighth paper by Taghipour and Frayret presents a decentralised coordination mechanism based on explicit negotiation and rooted in mathematical programming. The proposed mechanism involves two enterprises, which interact with each other to improve their collective performance. Computational analysis shows that the proposed negotiation-based coordination mechanism leads to near optimal results when compared to central coordination. The ninth paper by Santa-Eulalia et al. describes a methodological framework called FAMASS (FORAC Architecture for Modelling Agent-based Simulation for Supply chain planning). It comprises four interactive modelling approaches: GPA (General Problem Analysis) and DPA (Distributed Problem Analysis) at the supply chain level; SAOA (Social Agent Organisation Analysis) and IAOA (Individual Agent Organisation Analysis) at the agent level. It provides a uniform representation of distributed supply chain planning systems using agent technology and a methodological approach in defining functional requirements of possible simulation experiments.