Modern Manufacturing Practices Research Articles

Smart Manufacturing and its Impact on Production Processes : A Review

This review paper aims to analyze the theoretical foundations of smart manufacturing and its impact on production processes, particularly in the domains of robotics and additive manufacturing, across past, present, and future time horizons. It also explores the potential of smart manufacturing to improve the precision of manufacturing processes, as well as the challenges it poses to the manufacturing sector. This overview will deepen our understanding of modern manufacturing practices. It's worth noting that some scientific developments and technological tools discussed here can be applied to a wider range of automated systems beyond the manufacturing sector. As such, this paper offers valuable insights for those involved in automated system design and implementation.

Innovations at the Nexus of Sustainability and Industry 4.0: Data-Driven Approach for Preemptive Equipment Management in Smart Factories

The convergence of Industry 4.0 and sustainability has brought forth a new era of manufacturing, where data-driven approaches play a pivotal role in achieving operational efficiency while minimizing environmental impact. This paper presents an innovative framework for sustainable smart manufacturing through data-driven predictive maintenance planning. By integrating advanced analytics and machine learning, we propose a preemptive equipment management approach that not only optimizes production processes but also fosters environmental responsibility. Our methodology combines the power of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for pattern modeling and the Sea Lion Optimization Algorithm for feature selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a comprehensive empirical analysis conducted on a real case study, where the results indicate significant improvements over baseline studies, as evidenced by reduced Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), along with higher R-squared (R2) values. Our findings emphasize the synergy between technological innovation and sustainability imperatives, positioning our approach as a catalyst for reshaping modern manufacturing practices.

Optimization of FDM 3-D printer process parameters for surface roughness and mechanical properties using PLA material

3D printing and Rapid prototypic has a greater impact in modern manufacturing practices. The demands from industries have created a need to research and develop new techniques for 3D printing with affordable cost. In recent time’s variety of 3D printers are available in the market which are affordable by an individual and can be used to prototype functional parts. Hence, increasing the number of outsourcing platforms for Rapid Prototyping and 3D printing, it is important to recognize specific process parameters and optimize them when parts are produced in masses as it is not feasible to alter the parameters for every batch with same application. In this present work, the process parameters such as layer thickness (0.15 mm, 0.25 mm and 0.35 mm), nozzle temperature (210 °C, 215 °C, 220 °C) and infill density (55%, 60% and 65%) are manipulated to print specimens made of PLA (Polylactic Acid). These specimens are designed as per ASTM standards and printed using Fused Deposition Modeling technique. Taguchi Design is used to design an Orthogonal Array for the manipulated parameters according to which the specimens are printed. Finally, Surfaces Roughness test, tensile test and Hardness test are conducted; the data from these tests is used to optimize the manipulated parameters.

Challenges facing components reuse in industrialized housing: A literature review

Concerns over the earth’s ability to sustain itself over the long term as a consequence of human consumption of natural resources points towards sustainable development. Since a large proportion of human consumption is linked to buildings and construction, this means managing the construction process in more sustainable ways. Strategies that target greater material efficiency and which promote circular economy concepts are among several approaches that are gaining in popularity. The adoption of life-cycle thinking and practices in design, construction and end of life through the reuse of construction components and materials is one such action to achieve a sustainable built environment. Reuse is not a new concept and technical solutions do exist; however, practical realization is hampered by many interrelated challenges. This review paper is the result of a literature review for an exploratory study that aims to identify obstacles to the reuse of building components and materials. The context is industrialized housing, particularly timber-based construction, as this is a sector where modern manufacturing and onsite practices have become established. The main obstacles identified and corroborated in the literature, along with their potential solutions, are summarized and conclusions drawn on the future direction of research needs.

Responding to rapidly changing product demand through a coordinated additive manufacturing production system: a COVID-19 case study

COVID-19’s lockdown policies saw Modern Manufacturing Practice (MMP) – batch/mass/just-in-time supply chains – severed and societal demands rapidly change from products such as vehicles and clothing to Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), ventilators and equipment for remote working. The critical and, in many cases, life preserving, need for responsive manufacturing resulted in government and frontline services turning to society’s Additive Manufacturing (AM) capability in homes, schools, universities, and industry to provide essential products and product replacements. While AM managed to respond and support some government and frontline services, the highly distributed and diverse nature of the nation’s AM resources resulted in potentially avoidable production inefficiencies and delays. This paper develops and evaluates a series of strategies for coordinating AM for rapidly changing product demand to further enhance the responsiveness and productivity of AM. The strategies presented in the paper employ a host-client agent-based architecture that enable local governance of production thereby enabling distributed AM resource to come together to tackle society’s production needs without the need for centralised coordination. To enable and support local governance, it is necessary to understand how the combination of production logics impact the overall performance of the production system. Correspondingly, the contribution of this paper lies in the characterisation and quantification of the impacts of production logic through the metrics of Time in System, Lateness and Jobs in Queue and the consequences for responsive AM production systems.

The hazardous threat of Bisphenol A: Toxicity, detection and remediation

Bisphenol A (or BPA) is a toxic endocrine disrupting chemical that is released into the environment through modern manufacturing practices. BPA can disrupt the production, function and activity of endogenous hormones causing irregularity in the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal glands and also the pituitary-adrenal function. BPA has immuno-suppression activity and can downregulate T cells and antioxidant genes. The genotoxicity and cytotoxicity of BPA is paramount and therefore, there is an immediate need to properly detect and remediate its influence. In this review, we discuss the toxic effects of BPA on different metabolic systems in the human body, followed by its mechanism of action. Various novel detection techniques (LC-MS, GC-MS, capillary electrophoresis, immunoassay and sensors) involving a pretreatment step (liquid-liquid microextraction and molecularly imprinted solid-phase extraction) have also been detailed. Mechanisms of various remediation strategies, including biodegradation using native enzymes, membrane separation processes, photocatalytic oxidation, use of nanosorbents and thermal degradation has been detailed. An overview of the global regulations pertaining to BPA has been presented. More investigations are required on the efficiency of integrated remediation technologies rather than standalone methods for BPA removal. The effect of processing operations on BPA in food matrices is also warranted to restrict its transport into food products.

Material efficiency: a key sustainable manufacturing strategy

Inefficient material utilization results in extra pressure on the environment for the extraction of more material to meet production demand and therefore makes the environment unsustainable. The survival of the manufacturing industry depends on its ability to balance several requirements to meet up with dynamic market demand particularly materials for production ranging from raw materials, intermediate materials to spare components for maintenance. In the past, sustainability and efficiency were no challenges to the manufacturers and material extraction from the environment was always below replenishment. Presently, the reverse is the case where the demand for production material has become incessant and surpasses supply on account of increasing population and modern manufacturing practices thereby resulting in irresponsible exploitation of raw material. This paper aims to evaluate the current efforts in the topic area to gain insight into the impact of material efficiency on the manufacturing performance concerning other manufacturing strategies alongside the environment. It appears from the review that the balance between manufacturing material extraction from the environment and the replenishment rate determines the sustainability of both the manufacturing system and the environment. Hence material efficiency is an index for sustainable manufacturing strategy. We recommend the future research direction to looks into the development and determination of balance between manufacturing material extraction from the environment and the replenishment rate for a sustainable future manufacturing.

Green and Environment Conscious Manufacturing and Management Techniques

Contemporary industry is beginning to realize the negative impact that they have on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of natural habitats, hazardous waste emissions, etc. This new found consciousness has prompted a second look on part of the manufactures at how modern manufacturing practices can be modified so as to be more environmentally friendly. Environmental impact of manufacturing can be minimized in various ways. In this context, management is often called upon to provide active leadership in managing their facilities so as to minimize their environmental impact. Some examples of such activities include green supply chains and design for disassembly. Such activities help to create a closed loop product lifecycle that is required to reduce the amount of raw material used and the amount of waste created by production. Similarly using design for manufacturability principles aid in the minimization of raw material used and waste generated as well. Also, facilities are starting to move away from reactive approaches to environmental issues. They are now using proactive approaches and value seeking approaches where the environmental issues are dealt with before they are created. This paper presents an overview of environment conscious manufacturing practices that seek to minimize the negative environmental impact of manufacturing. Being a literature review, this paper primarily deals with state of the art in current practice pertaining to green manufacturing.

Modern Manufacturing Practices and Agile Enterprise. Anticipated Scope of Implementation and Empirical Results from Polish Enterprises

This paper focuses on an organizational structure aspects in agile enterprises with the aim of summarizing the actual research issue both: theoretical postulates and their empirical verification. The theoretical model of the own research is based on S. Trzcielinski model of agile enterprise that describes an agile enterprise in four dimensions: 1. Shrewdness of the enterprise, which is a function assigning to the turbulent environment a string of potential market opportunities 2. Resource flexibility of the enterprise transforms the string of potential opportunities into a string of resource available opportunities. 3. Enterprise's intelligence is an ability to understand situations and find deliberate reactions to them, that is to activate proper resource to weaken the threats or use the opportunities. 4. Smartness of the enterprise is an ability to quickly use the opportunities in a benefit brining manner. These agile dimensions are interpreted from the situational conditions of an enterprise: internal and external factors. The internal factors are: market orientation, product/ service customization, key process creating market advantage, business goals, and organizational goals. The external factors are levels of branch stability. The theoretical model of anticipated scope of implementation of modern production practices has been verified in two of larger empirical research projects undertaken at the Faculty of Engineering Management of Poznan University of Technology. The first project from 2012, called “Adjustment of enterprises’ management systems to knowledge-based economy”, and the second one from 2014, called “Determinants of implementing modern methods and technics of management in Polish enterprises”. The both empirical research surveyed 150 of enterprises represented Polish economy. There are four parts of the paper: 1. Introduction; 2. The characteristics and model of an agile enterprise; 3. The empirical results from the own researches; 4. Conclusions.

Looking backwards to go forward – use of traditional Indian pattern making to develop contemporary methods for global fashion

The Indian darzi (tailor) used his skills astutely to deliver a piece of clothing demonstrating economical usage of fabric, easy fit and adjustable sizes using straight lines and geometrically shaped components. Three key elements of traditional Indian methods of pattern making i.e. use of simple straight lines, gussets to provide fit and ease of movement and bias to achieve three-dimensional fits have been researched as an attempt to use them in a simplified form for modern mass manufacturing practices. Traditional Indian finishing techniques such as sinjaf (facing), ghundi and tukama (fabric buttons and loops) have also been incorporated. Metric pattern cutting and draping methods following traditional methods of measurements and pattern making have been tried along with innovative techniques such as elimination of seam lines, raising or lowering waistlines and combining gussets into adjacent panels. This research has lead to the development of new pattern making techniques that can be applied to global fashion.

The Incentive Value of Inventory and Cross‐training in Modern Manufacturing

ABSTRACTThis paper shows that major components of modern manufacturing processes, such as inventory management and cross‐training, play a significant control role. In our model, workers possess information that is critical to efficient ongoing operations. An organizational design that motivates workers to optimally apply this information leverages both the production schedule and worker–management communication. Management's use of these controls results in work‐in‐process (WIP) inventory that appears excessive from a pure job‐scheduling perspective, but is optimal when control issues are considered. Empirical work testing pure job‐scheduling theories of modern manufacturing practices has yielded mixed results. We provide control‐related interpretations for these empirical findings, and also provide novel predictions regarding the link between inventory levels and the nature of operational information asymmetries. Overall, our model highlights the importance of recognizing both control and scheduling issues when analyzing production processes.

Fuzzy extensions to Integer Programming models of cell-formation problems in machine scheduling

Cell formation has received much attention from academicians and practitioners because of its strategic importance to modern manufacturing practices. Existing research on cell formation problems using integer programming (IP) has achieved the target of solving problems that simultaneously optimise: (a) cell formation, (b) machine-cell allocation, and (c) part-machine allocation. This paper will present extensions of the IP model where part-machine assignment and cell formation are addressed simultaneously, and also a significant number of constraints together with an enhanced objective function are considered. The main study examines the integration of inter-cell movements of parts and machine set-up costs within the objective function, and also the combination of machine set-up costs associated with parts revisiting a cell when part machine operation sequence is taken into account. The latter feature incorporates a key set of constraints which identify the number of times a part travels back to a cell for a later machine operation. Due to two main drawbacks of IP modelling for cell formation, i.e. (a) only one objective function can be involved and (b) the decision maker is required to specify precisely goals and constraints, fuzzy elements like fuzzy constraints and fuzzy goals will be considered in the proposed model. Overall the paper will not only include an extended and enhanced integer programming model for assessing the performance of cell formation, but also perform a rigorous study of fuzzy integer programming and demonstrate the feasibility of achieving better and faster clustering results using fuzzy theory.

Manufacturing process diagnosis using functional regression

The quality of many manufacturing processes depends on preset process conditions and is strongly affected by process faults. Fault diagnosis is therefore crucial in modern manufacturing practice. This paper presents a new fault diagnosis approach based on the functional regression method. Fault patterns in manufacturing processes are treated as functional responses of both the preset process conditions and process faults. With these time domain functions, a mathematical model is developed, based on which a nonlinear optimization approach is applied to fault diagnosis. The proposed diagnosis approach considers the interaction effects among the faults and process settings. Therefore, it is capable of classifying multiple simultaneous faults with various process conditions. The new diagnosis method is demonstrated using an example from the resistance spot welding process. An overall success rate of 88% has been achieved.

Influence of cutting edge preparation on the wear resistance in high speed dry gear hobbing

Gear hobbing remains a cutting technology where high speed steels continue to find wide applications in modern manufacturing practice. The improvements in hobbing tool design are problematic due to the very long duration of wear tests. The application of an analogy process called ‘fly hobbing’ has been developed on a five-axes milling machine so as to improve the productivity of the investigations. This process has been used to investigate the influence of the cutting edge preparation on the wear resistance of gear hobs made of PM-HSS in the context of dry high-speed manufacturing. An original edge preparation procedure, based on the abrasive flow machining technology, has revealed a great improvement of the tool life.

To Pull or Not to Pull: What Is the Question?

The terms pull and lean production have become cornerstones of modern manufacturing practice. However, although they are widely used, they are less widely understood. In this paper, we argue that while the academic literature has steadily revealed the richness of the pull/lean concepts, the practitioner literature has progressively simplified these terms to the point that serious misunderstandings now exist. In hopes of reducing confusion, we offer general, but precise definitions of pull and lean. Specifically, we argue that pull is essentially a mechanism for limiting WIP, and lean is fundamentally about minimizing the cost of buffering variability.

An international survey of the use and effectiveness of modern manufacturing practices

AbstractWe describe a survey of the use and effectiveness of 12 manufacturing practices. The survey was administered to a random, stratified sample of companies with 150 or more employees in the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and Switzerland, yielding a total sample of 898 companies. We report findings on the extent of use of the practices, when they were introduced, their predicted future use, their effectiveness, and the correlates of their use and effectiveness. The data are examined for differences by country of location and country of ownership, as well as by industrial sector. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An integrated approach to bioprocess recipe design

Biotechnical and food process industries have a need for tools that support the implementation of modern manufacturing practice. Flexible production strategies and total quality management require efficient design of the process recipes. This paper p

Lessons from Uncle Sam

It is widely acknowledged that there is a productivity gap between the UK and the US manufacturing industries. Some of the key factors that influence this gap are investigated. These are: US firms benefit from a much larger, less open homogenised domestic market place; US manufacturers are exploiting maximum benefits from modern manufacturing practices such as lean manufacturing; US manufacturing employees earn more than their UK counterparts; teamwork; and investment and R&D.

Change and innovation in modern manufacturing practices: An expert panel survey of U.K. companies

Change and innovation in modern manufacturing practices: An expert panel survey of U.K. companies

Change and innovation in modern manufacturing practices: An expert panel survey of U.K. companies

The aim of this research was to examine the change and innovation capabilities of U.K. manufacturing companies across a range different sectors, and with regard to a variety of modern manufacturing practices. This was achieved by interviewing experts drawn from research, consultancy, professional bodies, and manufacturing companies. The findings indicate that there are optimistic signs for believing that U.K. companies are improving their change capabilities (e.g., project planning, selling and communicating change, consulting end users). More pessimistically, it was found that companies could develop their change capabilities further in a number of key areas (e.g., strategic and systemic thinking, end user participation, management of learning and expertise, evaluating change). It is also suggested that companies are particularly poor at learning from their experiences of managing change, and that this inhibits the further development of change and innovation capabilities. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.