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Today, manufacturing industries are trying to improve their competitiveness by combining manufacturing per se with information technology. Virtual reality is being used in product development processes in manufacturing enterprises as a helpful technology to achieve rapid consolidation of information and decision-making through visualization and experience. In this article, 154 articles relevant to virtual reality’s application to manufacturing were surveyed and analyzed. For this, (1) an analysis map was created, based on a virtual reality technology classification and the new product development process; (2) the articles investigated were located on the map; and (3) bibliometric analyses were carried out. Trends in past and present research were examined and future virtual reality research directions and application plans for manufacturing enterprises are discussed.

Smart manufacturing, today, is the ability to continuously maintain and improve performance, with intensive use of information, in response to the changing environments. Technologies for creating smart manufacturing systems or factories are becoming increasingly abundant. Consequently, manufacturers, large and small, need to correctly select and prioritize these technologies correctly. In addition, other improvements may be necessary to receive the greatest benefit from the selected technology. This paper proposes a method for assessing a factory for its readiness to implement those technologies. The proposed readiness levels provide users with an indication of their current factory state when compared against a reference model. Knowing this state, users can develop a plan to increase their readiness. Through validation analysis, we show that the assessment has a positive correlation with the operational performance.

Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) need to be agile to adapt to new situations by using detailed, precise, and appropriate data for intelligent decision-making. The intricacy of the relationship of strategic goals to operational performance across the many levels of a manufacturing system inhibits the realization of SMS. This paper proposes a method for identifying what aspects of a manufacturing system should be addressed to respond to changing strategic goals. The method uses standard modeling techniques in specifying a manufacturing system and the relationship between strategic goals and operational performance metrics. Two existing reference models related to manufacturing operations are represented formally and harmonized to support the proposed method. The method is illustrated for a single scenario using agility as a strategic goal. By replicating the proposed method for other strategic goals and with multiple scenarios, a comprehensive set of performance challenges can be identified.

Smart manufacturing has the potential to address many of the challenges faced by industry. However, the manufacturing community often needs assistance to leverage available technologies to improve their systems. To assure the performance of these technologies, this paper proposes a shared knowledge base that collects problem areas, solutions, and best practices for manufacturing technology. An Implementation Risk Assessment Framework (IRAF) is also described to identify the primary weaknesses of technologies in specific manufacturing contexts. Such approaches have the potential to stimulate new ideas and drive standardization activities critical to scale up and deploy smart manufacturing technologies successfully and quickly.

Smart Manufacturing Systems have the ability to adapt to rapidly changing requirements. Software components of the manufacturing system—services under Service Oriented Architecture—must be configured dynamically to meet such requirements. Currently, software vendors provide packaged services, so they are not easily reconfigurable. Thus, engineers or production managers face difficulty in composing services with the appropriate functionality and quality. The objective of this paper is to discuss high-level requirements for such a unit service concept and provide an initial use case to illustrate how the unit service concept may apply new technologies to improve service. We propose a decomposition of target service according to standard model, and we claim the limitations of decomposed unit services, and new technologies and opportunities for each decomposed services.

Production planning is carried out at the enterprise, operation, and process levels. Although production plans at higher levels constrain those at the lower levels, the processes for generating those plans are typically not well integrated in practice. Because of that, the schedules at lower levels may not accurately reflect what was planned at the higher levels while the plans at the high level may not be based on prevailing conditions at the lower levels. Simulation models that evaluate the performance of a production plan also need to be integrated with production management systems. This paper provides a background to integration problems associated with simulation-based multi-level production planning by exploring current practices, standards, and tools. We lay a foundation for a standards-based simulation for integrated production planning.