Case Study

Introduction to CPS and CPS-PMH

• Nowadays, the emerging cyber physical system (CPS) presents a significant
opportunity to implement smart manufacturing.
• the realization of the increasing importance of integration between computing
systems and physical processes gave rise to CPS.
• The CPS can assist manufacturing systems with advanced technologies,
including Internet of Things (IoT) , big data analytics , cloud computing etc.
• Overview of CPS-PMH
This research focuses mainly on discrete manufacturing shop-floors which have
a centralized storage area and limited buffer around each workstation. The
objective of the proposed method is to change traditional passive material
handling strategy by using predictive analytics and CPS technologies.
Proactive material handling
• Proactive material handling is responsible for making material
handling decisions based on the prediction of the future status of
manufacturing systems, including future logistics tasks prediction and
trolley status prediction. In a shop-floor, mainly four kinds of logistics
tasks are important, i.e., raw material entrance (from warehouse or
last shop-floor to the shop-floor), processed WIPs movement (from
one workstation to next workstation or CSA), queuing WIP movement
(from CSA to workstation), and finished product exit (to outside
warehouse or next shop-floor). This paper focuses on the WIP
movement within a shop-floor, i.e., the second and third kind tasks.
 Problem
Here, an industrial case from a collaborative company is used to demonstrate the
proposed CPS-PMH. The company is a typical manufacturer for tire mould production in
Southern China. Since the sizes of most tire moulds are large, it is expensive to keep a
buffer area for each machine. The shop-floor sets a CSA to store the materials and no
buffer is set around each machine. As a result, the WIPs need to be moved to the CSA or
next workstation directly from the manufacturing machine; otherwise, the machine will
be occupied and cannot process following materials.
Currently, the shop-floor uses a passive and manual material handling strategy in its
logistics system: 1) after a WIP is processed, the manufacturing worker asks an idle
logistics worker to move the WIP and bring next WIP. 2) the logistics worker finds a
trolley and takes related tools to load the WIP. 3) the logistics worker moves the WIP
according to his experience and production plan. 4) the logistics worker finds next WIP
and bring it to the machine. Under this situation, a long idle time of the machine is often
consumed and much unnecessary energy consumption from both trolleys and machines
is also wasted. Therefore, the company is truly in need of CPS-PMH methods and tools.
Proactive material handling method
• After the RPT of all the current WIPs in the shop-floor is forecasted,
the proactive material handling method can be involved. Firstly, a set
of logistics tasks are created based on the RPT prediction information.
Secondly, a limited number of tasks are extracted, for example, a set
of top 20 logistics tasks are selected in Table 2. It can be seen that the
selected tasks consist of four important attributes, i.e., release time
from last machine, use time of next machine, from and to location of
predicted tasks, occupation energy consumption, and idle energy
consumption. Then, the smart trolleys that will be available before
the last task releases are filtered, as shown in Table 3. Two main kinds
of information are given, i.e., available time and available location.
Conclusion
• In order to cope with frequent changes and disturbances, many companies applying advanced
CPS technologies to keep high-level production traceability and controllability about its shop-
floor.
• The main contributions of this work include
 an overall architecture of a proactive material handling method for CPS-enabled shop-floor.
a proactive material handling strategy which can consider both realtime and future status of
smart trolleys and WIPs at the same time.
The proposed CPS-PMH and its key technologies provide an opportunity to improve shop-floor
production fluency and efficiency.
challenge is how to incorporate the proposed CPS-PMH with other enterprise information
systems (EISs) (such as advanced planning system, MRP, etc.) so that more feasible and optimal
production and logistics schedule can be made. The third challenge is how to combine the
more comprehensive big data.