Synchroperation in industry 4.0 manufacturing

Abstract

Industry 4.0 connotes a new industrial revolution with the convergence between physical and digital spaces, which is revolutionizing the way that production operations are managed. The requirement of increased productivity, improved flexibility and resilience, and reduced cost in Industry 4.0 manufacturing calls for new paradigms that comply with the changing of production and operations management. In this paper, a concept of synchroperation, which is defined as “synchronized operations in an agile, resilient and cost-efficient way, with the spatiotemporal synchronization of men, machines and materials as well as data-driven decision-making, by creating, establishing and utilizing cyber-physical visibility and traceability in operations management”, is proposed as a new paradigm of production and operations management for Industry 4.0 manufacturing. A Hyperconnected Physical Internet-enabled Smart Manufacturing Platform (HPISMP) is developed as a technical solution to support manufacturing synchroperation. Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System (GiMS) with divide and conquer principles is proposed to address the complex, stochastic, and dynamic nature of manufacturing for achieving synchroperation. An industrial case is carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed concept and method. This article provides insight into exploring production and operations management in the era of Industry 4.0.

Introduction

Industry 4.0 connotes a new industrial revolution with the convergence between physical and digital spaces, which is triggered by the confluence of disruptive technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) (Atzori et al., 2010), cyber-physical systems (CPS) (Lee et al., 2015), cloud computing (Xu, 2012), big data (Kusiak, 2017), digital twin (Tao et al., 2017) and artificial intelligence (AI) (Li et al., 2017), etc. With the support of these emerging technologies, traditional manufacturing resources have been converted into smart objects augmented with identification, sensing and network capabilities (Korteum et al., 2009). Thus, the dynamic production operations could be organized and managed in an integrated, optimized and synchronized manner with real-time information sharing and visibility (Guo et al., 2020a). The hyper-connection, digitization and sharing in the context of Industry 4.0 have the potential to revolutionize, or at least change, the way that production operations are done and therefore, how operations should be managed (Olsen and Tomlin, 2020).

In the past decades, one acknowledged breakthrough in production and operations management was the Toyota production system (TPS) with Kanbans and Just-in-Time (JIT) principle in the mid-1970s (Sugimori et al., 1977). TPS is also best known as JIT and Lean Production philosophy (Holweg, 2007), in addition to similar terms of flexible manufacturing (ElMaraghy, 2005), adaptive manufacturing (Monostori et al., 2010) and agile manufacturing (Inman et al., 2011), which are also viewed as main manufacturing paradigms at that time (Hu, 2013). JIT emphasizing that only the necessary products, at the necessary time, in necessary quantity are manufactured, has played a key role in revolutionizing production and operations management for the modern manufacturing industry. After realizing the benefits of JIT in production, many manufacturing enterprises have indeed made possible attempts to implement TPS/JIT systems, which has rendered the feasibility of developing advanced manufacturing systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (Jacobs, 2007), Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems (Zhong et al., 2013), and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) (Almada-Lobo, 2015) for contemporary production and operations management.

These manufacturing paradigms and advanced manufacturing systems for production and operations management are widely appreciated, but are insufficient in the era of Industry 4.0 (Yin et al., 2018; Koh et al., 2019; Ivanov et al., 2020). The requirement of customized demand, increased productivity, improved flexibility and resilience, and reduced cost calls for more synchronized production and operations management that comply with changing business climate in Industry 4.0 manufacturing. Production synchronization provides promising insights for production and operations management in Industry 4.0 manufacturing environment and received increasing attention in recent years (Qu et al., 2016; Luo et al., 2017; Lin et al., 2019; Pan et al., 2021). However, studies on how to leverage Industry 4.0 technologies and production synchronization to develop new paradigms of production and operations management for Industry 4.0 manufacturing are blank. Paving the way for the transformation and implementation of Industry 4.0 manufacturing, major challenges still exist as follows.

• How to identify key characteristics for transformation and implementation of Industry 4.0 manufacturing, and derive a paradigm of production and operations management in the era of Industry 4.0 from these characteristics?

• How to leverage advanced technologies in the era of Industry 4.0 for developing effective architectures to support the transformation of the new production and operations management paradigm?

• How to cope with the complex, dynamic and stochastic nature of manufacturing by proposing effective methodologies to support the implementation of the new production and operations management paradigm?

The challenges mentioned above motivated this study and, therefore, a concept of synchroperation, which is defined as “synchronized operations in an agile, resilient and cost-efficient way, with the spatiotemporal synchronization of men, machines and materials as well as data-driven decision-making, by creating, establishing and utilizing cyber-physical visibility and traceability in operations management”, is proposed as a new paradigm of production and operations management in the era of Industry 4.0 with cyber-physical synchronization, data-driven decision synchronization and spatio-temporal synchronization. A Hyperconnected Physical Internet-enabled Smart Manufacturing Platform (HPISMP) assisted with digital twin and consortium blockchain, is developed as a technical solution to support the transformation of manufacturing synchroperation. With the support of the HPISMP, Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System (GiMS) with “divide and conquer” principles is proposed to address the complex, stochastic, and dynamic nature of manufacturing for achieving synchroperation. An industrial case from an air conditioner manufacturer is carried out to illustrate the potential advantages of manufacturing synchroperation.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Related research streams are briefly reviewed in Section 2. In Section 3, the concept of synchroperation is introduced. A HPISMP is developed in Section 4. Section 5 presents GiMS with “divide and conquer” principles for achieving synchroperation. An industrial case from an air conditioner manufacturer is carried out in Section 6. Section 7 concludes the paper with some remarks on possible directions for future research.