A production bounce-back approach in the Cloud manufacturing network: case study of COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Industry 4.0 paradigm has enabled manufacturing systems with reformations for Cloud-based manufacturing business models. This reformation can create resilient structures as an inevitable opportunity for manufacturing supply networks. This is achieved by using service composition capabilities in Cloud manufacturing network which significantly enhances supply network performance when encountering disruptions. Focusing on redundancy as one of the most effective approaches to resiliency, a new model for manufacturing service composition is proposed. The model considers a minimum level of subentropy when responding to the demands at the process level while controlling the entropy overall at supply network level. This creates a balanced policy for entropy at the network level, and subentropies at the process level to both fulfill an optimal redundancy for disruption fulfillment and controling the complexity throughout the network. A case study is considered for manufacturing ventilator production COVID-19 pandemic. The capabilities of the proposed model for optimal application of unused firm capacities from other supply networks like military and university research groups have been discussed. The proposed model is also investigated for fulfillment of disruptions like COVID-19 equipment supply network with mentioned capabilities. These capabilities fulfill the transition of manufacturing business models to a service-oriented paradigm with resilient structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Industry 4.0
• resilience
• redundancy
• Cloud entropy
• supply network

Acknowledgments

The author would like to sincerely thank the reviewer who read the paper carefully and helped the authors to improve the quality of the paper by constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.