With the developments and applications of the new information technologies, such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, a smart manufacturing era is coming. At the same time, various national manufacturing development strategies have been put forward, such as Industry 4.0 , Industrial Internet , manufacturing based on Cyber-Physical System , and Made in China 2025 . However, one of specific challenges to achieve smart manufacturing with these strategies is how to converge the manufacturing physical world and the virtual world, so as to realize a series of smart operations in the manufacturing process, including smart interconnection, smart interaction, smart control and management, etc. In this context, as a basic unit of manufacturing, shop-floor is required to reach the interaction and convergence between physical and virtual spaces, which is not only the imperative demand of smart manufacturing, but also the evolving trend of itself. Accordingly, a novel concept of digital twin shop-floor (DTS) based on digital twin is explored and its four key components are discussed, including physical shop-floor, virtual shop-floor, shop-floor service system, and shop-floor digital twin data. What is more, the operation mechanisms and implementing methods for DTS are studied and key technologies as well as challenges ahead are investigated, respectively.

Digital Twin Shop-Floor: A New Shop-Floor Paradigm Towards Smart Manufacturing

As the industrial requirements change at a rapid pace due to the drastic evolution of technology, the necessity of quickly investigating potential system alternatives towards a more efficient manuf...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207543.2019.1636321

Simulation in the design and operation of manufacturing systems: state of the art and new trends

Simulation in Manufacturing: Review and Challenges

The aim of this article is to analyze and review the scientific literature relating to the application of Augmented Reality (AR) technology in industry. AR technology is becoming increasingly diffu...

Augmented reality technology in the manufacturing industry: A review of the last decade

Augmented Reality (AR) systems could improve performance of manufacturing processes.AR systems are characterized by high technological complexity.Their effective application in the manufacturing requires methods integrating technological and process based metrics.A multi-criteria model is proposed to evaluate the feasibility of AR system application. Augmented Reality (AR) systems in last few years show great potentialities in the manufacturing context: recent pilot projects were developed for supporting quicker product and process design, as well as control and maintenance activities. The high technological complexity together with the wide variety of AR devices require a high technological skill; on the other hand, evaluating their actual impacts on the manufacturing process is still an open question. Few recent studies have analysed this topic by using qualitative approaches based on an "ex post" analysis - i.e. after the design and/or the adoption of the AR system - for evaluating the effectiveness of a developed AR application. The paper proposes an expert based tool for supporting production managers and researchers in effectively evaluating a preliminary ex-ante feasibility analysis for assessing quantitatively most efficient single AR devices (or combinations) to be applied in specific manufacturing processes. A multi-criteria model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been proposed to provide decision makers with quantitative knowledge for more efficiently designing AR applications in manufacturing. The model allows to integrate, in the same decision support tool, technical knowledge regarding AR devices with critical process features characterizing manufacturing processes, thus allowing to assess the contribution of the AR device in a wider prospective compared to current technological analyses. A test case study about the evaluation of AR system in on-site maintenance service is also discussed aiming to validate the model, and to outline its global applicability and potentialities. Obtained results highlighted the full efficacy of the proposed model in supporting ex-ante feasibility studies.

S. Jiang

Papers

A novel facility layout planning and optimization methodology