Real-Time Asset Tracking for Smart Manufacturing

Abstract

The ability to track assets in real-time is critical to manufacturing and is an essential component for smart factories. Such a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) for asset tracking provides useful data inputs for various purposes such as monitoring of personnel on the factory floor, equipment utilization, inventory levels and flow of work-in-progress (WIP). This in turn leads to better identification of bottlenecks, optimization of factory layouts, more informed planning and scheduling, and hence an overall improvement in productivity. This chapter details the benefits of asset tracking in a smart manufacturing environment. It covers the various techniques and technologies currently available for real-time asset tracking. The issues faced in deploying a practical real-time asset tracking system and the hardware and software solutions available to mitigate the different challenges are discussed. The state-of-the-art research being done in the area of RTLS for manufacturing is also presented to provide the reader with an idea of the type of advanced solutions that can be expected in the future.