End-to-end manufacturing in factories of the future

Abstract

In the last decades, manufacturing companies have increasingly outsourced many of their functions in order to focus on their core skills and competencies. Moreover, manufacturers often have to join together in dynamic manufacturing networks in order to respond to business demands or new opportunities. Given the heterogeneity of enterprises systems, knowledge representation methods and semantics, the management of such networks is not trivial. The lack of standard tools, methodologies, and a common semantic makes the creation and monitoring of such networks difficult. Therefore, the IMAGINE project defined a framework for an interoperable end-to-end manufacturing that potentially will become essential in factories of the future. As a consequence the same project implemented a platform based on such framework guidelines which provides a central repository and standardised search, configuration and simulation capabilities to enable an efficient creation, monitoring and management of dynamic manufacturing networks. The paper presents an extension to the IMAGINE platform to enable any manufacturer to integrate its systems with such platform, in a way that guarantees seamless interoperability, thus ensuring proper communication and data exchange between all the partners in a manufacturing network throughout the entire manufacturing life cycle, from supplier search to manufacturing execution and monitoring. The use of the proposed platform extension is exemplified through a use case scenario in the furniture manufacturing sector.