RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system for mass-customization production

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Abstract

Mass-customization production (MCP) companies must fight with shop-floor uncertainty and complexity caused by wide variety of product components. The research is motivated by a typical MCP company that has experienced inefficient scheduling due to paper-based identification and manual data collection. This paper presents an RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system (RT-MES). RFID devices are deployed systematically on the shop-floor to track and trace manufacturing objects and collect real-time production data. Disturbances are identified and controlled within RT-MES. Planning and scheduling decisions are more practically and precisely made and executed. Online facilities are provided to visualize and manage real-time dynamics of shop-floor WIP (work-in-progress) items. A case study is reported in a collaborating company which manufactures large-scale and heavy-duty machineries. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed RT-MES are evaluated with real-life industrial data for shop-floor production management in terms of workers, machines and materials.

Highlights

RFID technology is deployed to MCP concerned manufacturing objects to capture real-time data. ► Disturbances are captured by RFID to form a real-time adaptive decision mode. ► Any movements of materials are captured by RFID and WIP inventory level is reduced finally.

Introduction

Mass-customization production (MCP) is a competitive mode of producing a wide variety of customized products using a large-scale mass production strategy to satisfy diverse customer requirements and to reap benefits both from mass and craft production [32], [40]. In typical MCP companies, the arrival of customer orders and operation times are highly stochastic, resulting in a variety of disturbances such as emergency orders and frequent engineering changes. Because a considerable amount of parts and components used in mass-customized products are one of a kind, the involved setup times and processing times are difficult to estimate. Such uncertain disturbances will affect normal production plans and schedules [9]. Furthermore, these disturbances cause snow-ball effects such as delays on customer orders, logistics errors and high level of work-in-progress (WIP) inventories. Fire-fighting becomes common between the production department planner whose primary aim is to deliver the products on time, and shop-floor supervisor whose major objective is to maximize machine utilization and productivity [16].

In order to address the above challenges, MCP companies have been introducing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. The use of ERP systems achieves a better integration and flow of information between business functions inside and outside an organization [10]. However, this ERP approach alone is not adequate. First, ERP concentrates on the managerial level of decision-making and its shop-floor supervision is relatively weak to support frontline workers and supervisors. Second, ERP usually needs real-time and accurate shop-floor data to generate perfect decisions. Unfortunately, MCP companies do not have such real-time data collection mechanisms in place. That causes a serious gap between the flow of shop-floor physical materials and the flow of information or decisions.

The recent movement has advocated the approach of complementing the ERP system with MES (manufacturing execution system). ERP and MES form a bi-level twinned systems overcoming each other's shortcomings [28], [38]. MES mainly concentrates on managing shop-floor operations such as scheduling as well as its execution and control, timely informing shop-floor supervisors in terms of equipment status, material delivery and consumption as well as manufacturing progress [2]. Due to its tangible and intangible benefits, MES has been adapted and adopted in great many of manufacturing fields [12], [8].

Since most MCP items are one of a kind and their statuses must be uniquely tracked on manufacturing shop floors, data collection is significant when such companies contemplate to implement MES. Unfortunately, the paper-based data collection system dominates in their manufacturing sites such as shop floors and warehouses. As a result, field data are often incomplete, inaccurate and untimely [34]. The paper-based system forces them to make plans and schedules manually and cannot address the disturbances efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, the visibility and traceability of manufacturing items such as WIP are so weak that high inventory level of WIP is common in MCP companies.

In order to facilitate the real-time data collection, RFID (radio frequency identification) has been proposed to capture manufacturing data, aiming at real-time synchronization of physical flow of materials and associated information flow [33], [31], [29]. Based on the synchronization, Kohn firstly used real-time RFID data for supporting the repair work control [20]. Since then, RFID-enabled real-time applications have been widely expected, reported and recognized [22], [44], [19], [23].

This paper presents an RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system (RT-MES) for MCP shop-floor management including real-time data collection, real-time scheduling as well as real-time WIP tracing and tracking. The paper addresses three research questions: (1) How does RT-MES systematically deploy RFID devices on MCP shop-floors to capture real-time manufacturing data? (2) How does RT-MES adopt the real-time data to support MCP shop-floor scheduling? And (3) How does RT-MES enable real-time traceability and visibility of materials (e.g. WIP items) to reduce WIP inventory?

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief literature review related to the research under three categories: RFID-enabled data collection, RFID-enabled scheduling and RFID-enabled MES. Section 3 demonstrates the RT-MES for MCP in terms of framework and three innovative components. Section 4 reports on a case study on how RT-MES facilitates a real-life MCP company's shop-floor management in terms of workers, machines and materials. Section 5 concludes this paper by giving our findings and future research directions.

Section snippets

Literature review

Related research is reviewed under three categories: RFID-enabled data collection, RFID-enabled scheduling and RFID-enabled MES.

AUTO-ID enabled production data collection was emerging in the era of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) [41], [42]. In recent years, RFID has been emerging as an important Auto-ID technology which owns a lot of special advantages over others like barcode, including longer reading distance, larger data storage and so on. A preliminary approach was depicted to use

RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system for MCP

Fig. 1 describes a typical information system framework widely used in industry field. There are three layers: manufacturing shop-floor layer, manufacturing execution system (MES) layer and enterprise information system (EIS) layer. EIS layer is consisted with ERP, PDM (product data management) and CAPP (computer-aided process planning), which are responsible for making enterprise-level decisions.

A typical MES, as middle of Fig. 1, usually contains 11 functionalities which are designed and

Case study

This case study is based on a typical MCP company (named Keda) which is located in Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in southern China. The company is specialized in manufacturing customized ceramic and large-scale construction machineries. Currently, Keda employs over 2000 workers being responsible for operations management, product design, process planning and manufacturing operations. In the last two decades, Keda has developed to become the most successful ceramic equipments manufacturer in

Conclusion

This paper introduces an RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing execution system (RT-MES) for mass-customization production (MCP) companies whose shop-floor management faces the challenges of manual and paper-based data collection, plans and schedules affected by large number of disturbances and high WIP inventory level. RFID devices are systematically deployed in MCP sites to create an RFID-enabled real-time ubiquitous manufacturing environment. In the intelligent ambience, typical manufacturing

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to acknowledge 2009 Guangdong Modern Information Service Fund (GDIID2009IS048), 2010 Guangdong Department of Science and Technology Funding (2010B050100023), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61074146, 51105081), Industry-University-Research Cooperation Key Project of Guangdong Science and Technology Commission (2011B090400409), Guangdong College Talent Import Scheme (2011), Guangzhou Pearl River New Star Fund Science and Technology Planning Project (2011J2200017

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