Platform for Intelligent Manufacturing Systems with Elements of Knowledge Discovery
Tomasz Mczka, Tomasz abiski · InTech eBooks · 2012
Numerous and significant challenges are currently being faced by manufacturing companies.Product customization demands are constantly growing, customers are expecting shorter delivery times, lower prices, smaller production batches and higher quality.These factors result in significant increase in complexity of production processes and the necessity for continuous optimization.In order to fulfil market demands, managing the production processes require effective support from computer systems and continuous monitoring of manufacturing resources, e.g.machines and employees.In order to provide reliable and accurate data for factory management personnel the computer systems should be integrated with production resources located on the factory floor.Currently, most production systems are characterized by centralized solutions in organizational and software fields.These systems are no longer appropriate, as they are adapted to high volume, low variety and low flexibility production processes.In order to fulfil current demands, enterprises should reduce batch sizes, delivery times, and product life-cycles and increase product variety.In traditional manufacturing systems this would create an unacceptable decrease in efficiency due to high replacements costs, for example.(Christo & Cardeira, 2007) Modern computer systems devoted to manufacturing must be scalable, reconfigurable, expandable and open in the structure.The systems should enable an on-line monitoring, control and maximization of the total use of manufacturing resources as well as support human interactions with the system, especially on the factory floor.Due to vast amounts of data collected by the systems, they should automatically process data about the manufacturing processes, human operators, equipment and material requirements as well as discover valuable knowledge for the factory's management personnel.The new generation of manufacturing systems which utilizes artificial intelligence techniques for data analyses is referred to as Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS).IMS industrial implementation requires computer and factory automation systems characterized by a distributed structure, direct communication with manufacturing resources and the application of sophisticated embedded devices on a factory floor.(Oztemel, 2010) Many concepts in the field of organizational structures for manufacturing have been proposed in recent years to make IMS a reality.It seems that the most promising concepts www.intechopen.com