Integration design of material flow management in an e-business manufacturing environment

Authors:
Robin G. Qiu;Ying Tang;Qi Xu
Affiliations:
College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, PR China and Department of Information Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Malvern, PA;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ and Key Laboratory for Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Scie ...;Glorious Sun School of Business and Management, Donghua University, Shanghai, PR China
Venue:
Decision Support Systems
Year:
2006

Citing 2
Cited 4

A structured adaptive supervisory control methodology for modeling the control of a discrete event manufacturing system

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Timing constraint workflow nets for workflow analysis

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans

RFID-enabled automation in support of factory integration

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
Extending fieldbus standards to food processing and packaging industry: A review

Computer Standards & Interfaces
A novel heuristic approach for job shop scheduling problem

FAW'07 Proceedings of the 1st annual international conference on Frontiers in algorithmics
Cross-organizational collaborative workflow mining from a multi-source log

Decision Support Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A material flow management (MFM) system that controls and manages material flows on the shop floor is a Key component of enterprise information systems. It typically runs as a centralized software application, which becomes difficult in providing desirable system performance, robustness, flexibility, and interoperability in an e-business manufacturing environment. This paper proposes a solution to the design and development of a scalable, reconfigurable, and distributed MFM system. Using the concept of Virtual Production Lines, production lines can be logically configured, and operated, respectively, in processing different families of products; MFM modules/instances are accordingly created to control and manage material flows in corresponding production lines. By reducing the complexity of MFM through the use of decomposed MFM instances and taking advantage of family-type process configurations, a manufacturing system can cut down machine setup time, reduce production cycle time, and improve system responsiveness. Moreover, multi-agents are utilized in the decomposed MFM instances that directly interact with enterprise workflow systems, so information on material consumption and movement can be delivered to office-level planning systems in a timely manner.