Abstract The diary food factories in Japan are facing serious challenges of severe labor shortage and the increased diversity of demand. Food manufacturing companies are forced to improve factories to be more productive and flexible to deal with the expanding market scale in the future and also the product diversity. To improve the productivity and the flexibility, automation technologies have been implemented in manufacturing system with the popularization of Industrial 4.0 and Smart Factory. Based on the actual system construction practice of a dairy factory which is as a case study, this paper proposes a five-level horizontal model with automation technologies, aiming to realize high efficiency, rapid integration and relocation of the manufacturing system. This paper introduces the composition, the specifications and the functions of the horizontal model, and evaluates the function of each level. Finally, through the case study and numerical comparison on cost and labor hours, we verify the superiority of the proposed horizontal hierarchical system model for food factories.

中文翻译：

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食品工厂横向系统模型研究——以加工奶酪生产企业为例

摘要 日本的奶制品工厂正面临着劳动力严重短缺和需求多样化的严峻挑战。食品制造公司被迫改进工厂以提高生产力和灵活性，以应对未来不断扩大的市场规模和产品多样性。为了提高生产力和灵活性，随着工业4.0和智能工厂的普及，自动化技术已经在制造系统中实施。本文以某乳制品厂的实际系统建设实践为案例，提出采用自动化技术的五级水平模型，旨在实现制造系统的高效、快速集成和迁移。本文介绍了组成，水平模型的规格和功能，并评估每个级别的功能。最后，通过成本和工时的案例研究和数值比较，我们验证了所提出的食品工厂水平层次系统模型的优越性。