Holistic management of next generation manufacturing system

Abstract

The manufacturing system is a widely addressed subject. Many researchers have worked since a significant number of years in this field. Still, manufacturing system performance is capped by the insufficient level of accordance between manufacturing system and product. At the same time, global energy and global information networks have been created during recent years. Besides other applications, these networks can be turned in hard and soft infrastructure supporting the manufacturing system. For this reason, many specialists consider that the conceptual rebuilding of the manufacturing system is a notable challenge. This paper answers to this challenge by suggesting a holonic technique for manufacturing system management at basic, operational level. The proposed technique lays on the following hypothesis: i) next generation manufacturing system will be a modular cyber-physical system, ii) the typical management task is decision making, and iii) the procedure for decision making consists in options identification, followed by their comparative assessment. The approach is to manage the manufacturing system activity by holonic modelling of the system functioning, followed by the identification of a dedicated holarchy. The proposed technique aims to mitigate system performance in what concerns responsiveness capacity, investment efficiency and production costs. The technique is presented in architectural conceptual manner.