Investigating the value of integrated operations planning considering multiple dependent shop-floor functions : realizing industry 4.0

Abstract

Nowadays, industries are moving towards the transformation of today’s factory into smart factory under the banner of Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing. The smart manufacturing has its roots in sensing technology, digitization, artificial intelligence, and machine-to-machine communications. While these technologies are being advanced to make machines more and more intelligent, use of such intelligence in manufacturing operations planning is missing in the literature. Consequently, the present thesis focuses on operations planning perspective of the industry 4.0. In specific, following two essential but conflicting challenges of operations planning are identified and addressed in this thesis. 1) Integration of various shop-floor functions viz., production, maintenance, quality, and inventory. 2) Responsiveness of integrated operations planning in dynamic conditions created by machine failures, change in demand, uncertainty in supply, etc. A detailed literature review presented in this thesis confirmed the need forsignificant advancement of the technology pertaining to integrated operations planning. Consequently, present thesis extensively contributed to the body of knowledge by developing advanced approaches for multifunction integration in realistic operations planning environments of manufacturing industries. Such integrated approaches are comprehensively investigated for various operations planning environments; it confirmed the value of integrated approaches over the conventionally done interrelated and independent approaches. Another radical advancement is made by the development of novel agent-based distributed computing approach for the integrated operations planning. The proposed agentbased approach significantly improves the responsiveness of the complex integrated operations planning decision-making. It has been developed around the inherent characteristics of next generation digital cum intelligent factory. It is concluded that the proposed integrated yet distributed operations planning approach will serve as the backbone of any next generation manufacturing planning system.