Intelligent Manufacturing Systems in COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Framework and Impact Assessment

Xingyu Li,Theodor Freiheit,Chao Liu,Bogdan I Epureanu,Baicun Wang

doi:10.1186/s10033-020-00476-w

Abstract

Pandemics like COVID-19 have created a spreading and ever-higher healthy threat to the humans in the manufacturing system which incurs severe disruptions and complex issues to industrial networks. The intelligent manufacturing (IM) systems are promising to create a safe working environment by using the automated manufacturing assets which are monitored by the networked sensors and controlled by the intelligent decision-making algorithms. The relief of the production disruption by IM technologies facilitates the reconnection of the good and service flows in the network, which mitigates the severity of industrial chain disruption. In this study, we create a novel intelligent manufacturing framework for the production recovery under the pandemic and build an assessment model to evaluate the impacts of the IM technologies on industrial networks. Considering the constraints of the IM resources, we formulate an optimization model to schedule the allocation of IM resources according to the mutual market demands and the severity of the pandemic.

Highlights

Pandemics like COVID-19 have created a spreading and ever-higher threat to human health
Considering the urgency and limited intelligent manufacturing (IM) resources available to implement IM during the current or future pandemics, determining an optimal priority for factory upgrades enhances the effectiveness for IM technologies to minimize damage to the industrial network and public health
4 Conclusions and Future Work In this study, we explore the application of intelligent manufacturing (IM) as a proactive solution to mitigate production disruptions caused by a pandemic

Summary

Introduction

Pandemics like COVID-19 have created a spreading and ever-higher threat to human health. *Correspondence: baicunw@umich.edu 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article distorted demand patterns and created market anomalies that has affected the ability to ramp-up production in some industries, i.e., in the medical equipment industry, and reduced operations in others, i.e., the aircraft industry. These emerging challenges stemming from COVID19 require industrial networks to be robust to production disruptions and market environment changes, and the manufacturing system to be agile so that production capacity can be leveraged to control risks and to support the needs of prevention.

Results

Conclusion