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Many developed countries are making various efforts to innovate their own manufacturing industries, through initiatives such as Manufacturing innovation 3.0, Industry 4.0, and Manufacturing 2025. Innovation in the manufacturing industry, represented by the so-called “smart factories,” is being developed through the latest technologies such as Internet of things (IoT), cloud, and big data. However, as the application of these technologies requires a lot of cost and time, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often hampered in their efforts to take full advantage of them. For an enterprise that operates a manufacturing information system, the integrated management of information between systems is essential to the application of a new technology. If the enterprise lacks the relevant experts, it will have difficulty applying a new technology in the field. This study suggests the application of a cloud-based applications’ integration and operation platform (AIOP) in order to resolve those problems. The AIOP must accept a large volume of data at IoT-based manufacturing fields, interconnect between manufacturing fields and AIOP, and provide application contents in the form of service. The suggested study contents are applied to a company that produces electric components using plastic injection molds to verify their effects. It is expected that this study can be used as a reference model for applying smart factory technologies to other SMEs in the future.

The Smart Factory is an important topic worldwide as a means for achieving Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing domain. Contemporary research on the Smart Factory has been concerned with application of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) to the shop floor. However, IoT in this context is often restricted to solving local problems such as managing product information, collaborative information exchange, and increasing productivity. To take full advantage of the potential of the IoT in manufacturing systems, it is necessary that the information service perspective should receive keen attention. This paper proposes a reference architecture for the information service bus or middleware for the Smart Factory that can be used for information acquisition, analysis, and application for the various stakeholders at the levels of Machine, Factory, and Enterprise Resource Planning. To reflect the real voice of the industry, real industrial problems have been identified, transformed into requirements, and incorporated into the information architecture; i.e., Smart Factory Information Service Bus. The implementation process of the reference architecture is also presented and illustrated via case studies.

As the product lifecycle is getting shorter and various models should be released to respond to the needs of customers and markets, automation-based flexible production line has been recognized as the core competitiveness. According to these trends, system vendors supply cell-level systems such as FMC(Flexible Manufacturing Cell) that is integration of core functions of FMS(Flexible Manufacturing System) and RMC(Reconfigurable Manufacturing Cell) that can easily extend components of FMC. In the cell-based environment, flexible management for shop floor composed of existing job shop, FMCs and RMCs from various system vendors has emerged as an important issue. However, there could be some problems on integrated operation between heterogeneous cells to use vendor-specific cell controllers and on seamless information flow with high level systems such as ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning). In this context, this paper proposes process management systems supporting integrated shop operation of heterogeneous multi-cell based flexible manufacturing environment: First of all, (1) Integrated Shop Operation System to apply the process management system is introduced, and (2) Multi-Layer BOP(Bill-Of-Process) model, a backbone of the process management system, is derived with its data structure. Finally, application of the proposed model is illustrated through system implementation results.

To cope with today's industrial demands requiring (1) coverage of the whole product life cycle, (2) environmentally conscious manufacturing, (3) competitive sustainability manufacturing, etc., a new manufacturing paradigm should be developed. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for a new paradigm called ubiquitous factory (u-Factory) by applying ubiquitous computing technology to the manufacturing system. The u-Factory is based on our previously developed paradigm, called UbiDMR [1], meaning product design, manufacturing, and recycling via ubiquitous computing technology. The essence of u-Factory can be represented by three key phrases: (1) information transparency, (2) autonomous control, and (3) sustainable manufacturing. This paper comprises two parts. In the first part, we show the derivation procedure for the framework of the u-Factory using problem analysis of the current manufacturing system, design consideration and derivation of the architecture for the ubiquitous factory. In the sec...

Due to concerns about environmental protection and resource utilization, product lifecycle management for end-of-life (EOL) has received increasing attention in many industrial sectors including manufacturing, maintenance/repair, and recycling/refurbishing of the product. To support these functions, crucial issues are studied to realize a product recovery management system (PRMS), including: (1) an architecture design for EOL services, such as remanufacturing and recycling; (2) a product data model required for EOL activity based on international standards; and (3) an infrastructure for information acquisition and mapping to product lifecycle information. The presented works are illustrated via a realistic scenario.