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Industry 4.0: Development of a multi-agent system for dynamic value stream mapping in SMEs

journal contribution
posted on 2024-11-02, 11:29 authored by Zhuoyu Huang, Jiwon Kim, Alireza Sadri, Steve Dowey, M Dargusch
As the next wave of productivity, Industry 4.0 aims to enhance the competitiveness and efficiency of manufacturers by bridging the gap between industrial manufacturing and information technology. Through digitalisation, it provides the advantage of enabling the real-time/near-real-time monitoring of manufacturing. This digital information allows monitoring tools such as Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to help the decision makers efficiently capture the non-value-adding processes on the factory floor. However, the application of VSM into small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), including diverse manufacturing environments, is not an easy task. It is even more challenging especially when the product processing is more complicated and requires improvements to labour management and facility utilization. Conventional VSM is not competent to handle the contemporary rapid dynamic manufacturing environment, complex material flow or efficiency of machine and labour performance. These three are the most important resources on the shop floor to bring transparency to the decision maker. We present a multi-agent system composed of several cost effective embedded Arduino systems as agents and a Raspberry-Pi® as a core agent. Equipped with Cyber-Physical System (CPS) technology, these agents, placed on or near the station, can reflect the non-linear material value flow without modelling the process or using RFID tags. Moreover, through the sensor node installed in each machine and by knowing the staff ID, the agents could send the relevant information in the form of dynamic value stream mapping (DVSM) in near-real-time for storage, analysis and visualization. We present a suitable visualization tool based in Node-RED® to carry out DVSM.

Funding

ARC Research Hub for Advanced Manufacturing of Medical Devices

Australian Research Council

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History

Journal

Journal of Manufacturing Systems

Volume

52

Start page

1

End page

12

Total pages

12

Publisher

Elsevier

Place published

United Kingdom

Language

English

Copyright

© 2019 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Former Identifier

2006095606

Esploro creation date

2020-06-22

Fedora creation date

2019-12-02

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