smart process monitoring and management in a distributed … · smart process monitoring and...

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Information, Operations Management and Statistics (ICIOMS2013), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, September 1-3, 2013

Smart process monitoring and management in a distributed manufacturing system: indexed towards virtual factory

Ahm Shamsuzzohaa*, Petri Heloa and MMR Khademb aUniversity of Vaasa, PO Box 700, Vaasa, FI-65101, Finland

bSultan Qaboos University, PO Box 50, Muscat 123, Sultanate of Oman

Abstract

Due to increasing level of competition and diversification of business environment, manufacturing firms, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are striving to survive with expected revenue growth. In such competitive business infrastructure SMEs needs to be work together where valuable resources and skills, knowledge and information are needed to be shared with the view to become competitive and gaining higher bargaining power over the comparatively large enterprises. This research is presented a methodology as well as demonstrated associated supporting tools to form and execute such collaboration successfully. This collaboration is archived in this study in the form of a virtual factory (VF), where various partner companies (mostly SMEs) are agreed to work together for mutual benefits. In order to run an efficiently and effective VF there needs to monitor and manage each of the individual processes within the VF. This research is also highlighted how the VF processes are monitored with the help of smart technologies such as sensors or internet of things. A case example is demonstrated with the objective to validate the proposed research approach. Keywords: Virtual factory; business collaboration; process monitoring; smart technlogy; SMEs

1. Introduction

In spite of rapid globalization and fierce competition from low cost countries, European SMEs are looking forward for a sustainable, knowledge-intensive manufacturing environment. This environment can ensure continuous innovation through developing high quality products with reduced cost. It can also be the sign of re-emergence of the EU manufacturing sector by adopting the underpinning products and processes with a need for consistent and a clear and long-term vision on the upcoming days. For a sustainable development, European companies, particularly SMEs must evolve and update and upgrade their traditional production processes. This demands for flexible manufacturing, stimulating working environments, exploiting intelligences and clean processing’s, etc. In order to fulfill such demands efficiently and effectively SMEs require more networking, adaptive business processes, increased added value in products, production and services [1].

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 29 449 8269; fax: +358 6 324 8467. E-mail address: [email protected].

2 Author name / ICIOMS Proceeding 00 (2013) 000–000

Business networking as evolves through the participation of distributed SMEs in a common platform develops a novel way to provide end-to-end collaboration with customers and manufacturers. This collaboration aims at designing, developing and deploying an agile virtual factory (VF) environment for networks of SMEs. This network offers co-creation of highly customized and service enhanced products based on the customers’ expectations [2]. This VF environment executes such networking activities through the implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) system. The ICT system supports value creation from distributed networked operations including supply chain management, product service linkage and management of distributed manufacturing resources. It is essential to ensure interoperability of ICT system among the VF partners for reliable end-to-end cross partner cooperation. Interoperability of ICT systems in the manufacturing domain can easily fuse dispersed assets among the partners such as business processes, information exchange and valuable resources.

In order to cope with fast-paced business innovation among SMEs, there is a need for an ICT enabled business framework that supports the collaboration from manufacturing process design to dissolve it finally. This framework creates the required environment to establish, manage, monitor and adapt virtual factories. The virtual factory provides a holistic environment for plug-and-play ICT system that supports to cross-organizational manufacturing processes. The requirements of manufacturing processes should be fulfilled through a deep understanding of technical level that has to be easy, flexible interoperability with minimum user skills to support SMEs. This technical platform also ensures to monitor and manage the VF manufacturing processes smartly and efficiently.

2. Theoretical framework

Global companies, particularly SMEs, must evolve and modernize their production processes. Latest technologies and approaches such as exploiting business collaboration, operational flexibility, process monitoring, stimulating working environments, ambient intelligence and clean processing should be fostered. Special focus on business collaboration ensures increased manufacturing process flexibility, adapted structures, stronger link between process research and innovation, increased added value in products, production and services and decreased environmental impacts [3]. More research into production processes is therefore a key issue in today’s vulnerable market segment. Any organization intending to move towards a process-based approach requires their business process descriptions to be extremely clear and understandable [4]. This clear process description enhances process monitoring through obtaining regular reports that visualizes the status information to complete specific tasks within a process.

Technically sound, well-structured and effective business processes are the pre-requisite for business performance in any manufacturing environment [5]. It may seem simple to identifying and describing business processes but in actual practice can be complex, depending on how the involved processes are monitored-hence the need for a process mapping exercise [6, 7]. In any business processes monitoring defines the ability and potential to provide customers and employees with effective and high quality services and solutions. The common monitoring process influences to improve existing business potential that will help to identify, measure and improve the performance of the business processes in a logical, strategic and self-reflective manner. It also helps to process mapping strategy that facilitates effective business development: problem areas of target services can then be identified and prioritized for process improvements [8]. Process mapping may also be used to review exiting processes to analyze and evaluate the current level and process owners should be kept informed of any adjustments to process descriptions.

Today’s manufacturing organizations must deal with a vast amount of incoming information from many different sources as they simultaneously struggle with a vast amount of information exchange among various business processes [9, 10]. Efficient and automated process monitoring is critical to managing information,

Author name / ICIOMS Proceeding 00 (2013) 000–000 3

improving productivity and servicing customers. A process monitoring system includes a diagnostic monitoring and display functionality for viewing process update in a coherent manner. This process update operates over multiple devices and system components that typically encompass widely different devices types and operational standards. The monitoring system incorporates diagnostic information relating to all devices and presents this information to a process-enabled system in a uniform manner from a single location. A user-defined monitoring program is assembled as a set of layers of interconnected smart objects that transmit required informational structures through function blocks and modules and accessed as attributes.

3. Virtual factory: today’s need

The enhancement of ICT and web-based technologies in the late 1990s has brought a major change in the business environment and collaborative thinking of companies. In order to be competitive with business success in such changed business environment, the companies are focusing more and more on the globalization of businesses and mainly collaboration in the product development across the value chain [11]. This business collaboration needs strong implementation of web-related technologies for the integration of various value chain constituents from suppliers/partners to customers. The idea of such collaborative product design and development is to share the intellectual capital in real time to reduce the time-to-market in the product life cycle.

In business collaboration it demands for real time information exchange across the enterprises that encompass product, process, and resources. This information exchange ensures optimization of design, resources and collaborative processes [12]. Business collaboration which the result of distributed manufacturing processes among partner companies need to virtualization over a common platform [13]. This virtualization resulted in the formation of virtual factory which involves various virtualization and data integration aspects. The virtual factory offers important paradigms of virtual manufacturing such design centered, production centered and monitoring and control centered virtualization. In VF environment, mainly SMEs are collaborate with each other with the objective to be competitive and achieving bargaining over the big companies through joint process planning and design, product design and development and resources management.

The concept of VF fulfill contemporary businesses need to effectively work together beyond cost, complexity and administrative burdens offering the dynamic formation of new industrial clusters as partners [14]. It contributes to the collaboration in complex supply chains through software platforms that can form sustainable, geo-specific ecosystems and support the collaboration of multi-disciplinary actors and companies. The VF proposes the conception of a collaborative internet-based platform that implements the adoption of a systematic innovation process in globally acting networked SMEs. The business scenarios of the participant SMEs will act as a virtual network by the way that they handle their relationships with third parties, such as customers, suppliers, distributors or partners. THE VF cluster is expected to achieve higher management efficiency of networked business operations in SMEs network.

4. Methodological steps in VF

In order to establish and execute a VF, there needs methodological steps that support the complete VF lifecycle successfully. These steps can be partner search, formation of VF with contractual agreement, VF process design and execution and termination of VF. The steps are briefly explained as follows.

(i) Partner search and selection


One of the critical issues to form of a VF is to search and selection of partner. This partner search process can be performed through searching by the help from today’s available technologies and tools such as internet (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), government records, personal communications, etc. Partners are generally searched after defining specific factors or requirements such as type of products or components to be design and develop. Based on such factors it is the responsibility of the VF broker who initiates and lead the VF to select the corresponding partners. Partners that form the VF from the beginning and shares higher risks, investments and responsibilities among each other are commonly known as core partners of the VF. These core partners share resources within the VF and subsequently go for other set of partners known as potential partners after executing the VF on its way forward.

Both the core partners and potential partners must be evaluated carefully in order to guarantee the desired level of trust. To improve cooperation and increase VF capabilities, the VF broker can invite companies to become members of the virtual community, ensuring them to access new business opportunities and gain competitive advantage on the market. Based on the predefined benefits and rules to potential new partners, partners search and selection process is invoked. Usually, in an established VF there are tools where the prospective partners fill up the invitation form which is consequently processed by the VF brokers and core partners. After selecting the qualified partners all the information is stored within the VF database that can be used for future references.

(ii) VF formation with contractual agreement As the VF is formed after selecting the partners, next available step is to make a contract among the VF

partners. This contract can be consists of a set of norms and conditions as essential to run the VF smoothly. In the formation of a VF, partners decide to collaborate in order to develop and/or produce a product/collection of products already existing or to be developed by the VF. The steps in the formation process comprises of collecting customers’ requirements, making contractual and NDA (non-disclosure agreement), designing the essential processes, detailed planning and resource scheduling.

There might be two levels of contractual agreement in the VF formation process: first level can be general terms and conditions for entering a VF and the other can be the contractual conditions and NDA that are related to the specific VF. In the first level, there might be a web-based platform that offers a signature based clicking options on the specified form (similar to terms and conditions which are usually ticked during buying online products). On the other hand, in the second level, contractual conditions are defined by the VF broker based on customer requirements, agreed with the other partners.

The VF contractual facts make the terms of a relationship explicit. A contract can suggest and unambiguously define quantifiable performance metrics which are prerequisite to making legally concrete rules. These metrics can be lead times, on-time delivery rates and conformance rates that are among the metrics commonly specified in VF contracts. The objective of most of contract models used is to guarantee the performance in terms of the expected profits of the VF partners. VF Contracts are useful tools to make partners of a decentralized network behave coherently and coordinate with each other. Contract is a set of many clauses that offers suitable information and incentive mechanism (sharing risks and rewards) to guarantee all companies in VF to achieve coordination and optimize the performance [15, 16].

(iii) VF process design: methodological approach Each of the processes within a VF requires a methodology that describes each of the steps to design and

implement a process that is applicable to VF execution. Examples of such the processes can be as: partner search, negotiation, contract preparation, manufacturing, supply chain, packaging, distributing, etc. A generic


approach to design a process can be presented as in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 highlighted five steps to design a process namely as; process model, use case diagram, class diagram, sequence diagram and process interface and interoperability.

Fig. 1. Methodological steps in designing a process for a virtual factory

Each of the steps is functioned according to its specific requirements. For instance, process design maps the essential processes and their interdependencies, whereas use case diagram explains the user interface with the processes. Class diagram of the process design stage visualizes the process hierarchy, whereas sequence diagram displays the required information exchange among the process actors. The final step process interface and interoperability ensures the interoperability of the different processes as need to be interfaced with other for operating the formed virtual factory.

(iv) VF execution model Associated processes within a VF demands for intrinsic design and development in order to execute the VF

efficiently. Before considering to design a process it is recommended to collect the related data or information about the process and also need to analysis the relationships and dependencies with other processes. In any process design, designer needs to follow several steps such as relevant data collection, identifying process functionalities, search for process bottlenecks and process routings and/or scheduling. Absolute measures are needed to maintain the process overall performances. Various performance metrics are sorted out to choose the best-fit metrics applicable to evaluate the process efficiencies and effectiveness. Fig. 2 illustrates the steps in VF process execution model.

Fig. 2. Various steps in VF process execution model

In the data collection phase of the VF execution model, all the collected data is securitized in terms of its authentication and reliability. The data related to the specific process design is analyzed with respect to identify its associated functionality. In functionality identification stage collected data is translated into its specific functionality that ultimately added value to the data entry. This phase is followed by the searching for bottlenecks of the process related data which is evolved during the process execution phase of the VF. In the


final phase, essential routing and/or scheduling of various VF processes are initialized to accomplish the final execution of the specified processes.

(v) VF termination After successful execution of a virtual factory it is need to be terminated. This is the last part of the VF

lifecycle and triggers when the VF is not needed anymore [17]. At this phase the business opportunity as identified before is ended whether successfully or unsuccessfully does not a matter. This termination process follows several steps such as sharing profit and distributing liability among partners, storage of VF related knowledge to make future VF more efficient, protection of IPR (intellectual proprietary right), liabilities towards the customer warrantees, storing the key performance indicators of the partner companies, etc.

5. Smart process monitoring in VF: conceptual model

In smart process monitoring system required information is consumed by smart objects which are used by the communication platform to inform the VF partners about recent issues, status information of both ongoing and upcoming manufacturing processes. This information related to manufacturing processes can be the information about the products, parts, raw materials as well as information about manufacturing utilities and delivery status. Process monitoring improves the overall efficiency of the partners companies that ultimately reduces costs and improve throughput. The smart objects make it easy and cost-effective to deploy predictive intelligence through the manufacturing processes. This predictive intelligence can be extended to areas that were previously out of physical or economic reach.

The smart objects that are used for monitoring the VF processes can be mobile devices, RFID tags or any kind of sensors. Application of such smart objects offers users a real-time view and imports real-world sensor data of the manufacturing processes. The efficient implementation of sensors and instrumentation devices is a prerequisite for the successful application of any VF process monitoring or control system task. A novel process monitoring method combined with smart objects is used to tackle the process failure through on time process update. These smart objects which are actually smart sensors received essential processes information and transmit to the common web-based platform for visualization. Fig. 3 displays the conceptual model of smart process monitoring.

Fig. 3. Conceptual model for smart process monitoring

From Fig. 3, it is seen that smart objects are placed near to each of the process areas that transmits required updated information of the corresponding processes. This information can be in the form of a text message that transmits to the mobile device or uploaded in the web portal. In VF environment, this portal displays


specific messages; such as level of alerts (high, low, medium), status of a process (machine break down, shortage of raw materials, etc.), faulty parts/components, etc. This process update through the smart objects are displayed on the web portal from where each responsible partners for the corresponding processes can visualize the process status for taking necessary measures or actions. For instance, if one partner failed to supply certain raw materials, an alert is sent immediately through the web portal to the VF broker that initiates to search and find for alternative partner/supplier as quickly as possible.

Fig. 4. Conceptual framework for smart process monitoring within VF

Fig. 4 displays the conceptual framework of smart process monitoring. From the Figure it is noticed that smart objects has direct interconnection between the virtual factory processes and indirect relationship with the cloud storage. Smart objects offer predictive information, real time information, condition-based monitoring through sensor-based technology and web-enabled data transfer facility. These smart objects transfer the sensitive information to the virtual factory processes that facilitate various process updates such as performance measurement, monitoring and management, decision making process and enhance collaborative businesses. All the processes related information are stored and retrieved within cloud-based data storage which is privately owned data segment is used to data mining, search, authentication with in housed security.

6. Smart process monitoring: case example

In order to explain the smart monitoring process, a virtual factory environment was created within the help from ICT-based platform. This platform was able to visualize the results from process monitoring which are displayed in Fig. 5. The information as displayed in Fig. 5 is coming from the smart objects attached to the corresponding partners manufacturing processes within the collaborative virtual factory. This information is transmits through the smart objects sensors which is uploaded to the previously built collaborative web-portal. This portal visualizes the information according to the user’s predefined role and need. For instance, the broker of a VF can visualizes all the process related information, whereas, a partner might see only some of the relevant information of his/her processes, a suppler might see his/her stock level, a customer might see information about his/her order status, etc.


Fig. 5. Summary of information display of various virtual factory processes

Fig. 5 displays various processes information through different widgets such as OEE (overall equipment summary), order summary, notifications, stock summary, etc. All the monitored information is displayed both in textual and graphical formats. Only the VF broker can visualize both summary and detail information of each of the VF processes as mentioned earlier. For example, the broker can displays the summary of OEE from different partners’ processes, order summary of different customers, various process notifications, suppliers stock level, etc. In order to get the detailed information of a process status, corresponding user needs to click on the specific widget as displayed in Fig. 6. Fig. 6 visualizes the OEE of different partners’ processes and their trends in terms of availability, performance, quality, and OEE.

Fig. 6. Detailed information display of a specific virtual factory processes


Process notification as collected through the smart objects can also be displayed over the web-based platform as presented in Fig. 7. From Fig. 7, it is noticed that VF partners’ process notifications are displayed according to various urgency levels with color codes, such as red for high importance, yellow for medium importance and green for low importance. Along with the level of notifications it also displays the geographical locations of the partners from where relevant notifications are coming from. From this smart monitoring process VF partners would be able to run the collaborative processes effectively and efficiency with minimum costs and highest reliability.

Fig. 7. Information display of partners process notifications levels

7. Discussions and conclusions

Global manufacturing companies have been changed dramatically in recent days from where they have changed their business models from simply manufacturing and selling products to formation of international strategic alliances and virtual organizations. The manufacturing networks that are emerging from this transformation are fundamental to appreciation of the implications of electronic business for manufacturing worldwide. This e-business system and its tasks must be defined along the supply/demand chain or value-creation network by configuration, position and optimization to achieve higher value and competitive advantage. In such e-business offers a spectrum of potential collaboration modes, including intra-firm coordination and inter-firm cooperation.

The inter-firm cooperation triggers in today’s high-tech business solution in the form of a virtual factory, which evolves after identification of potential business opportunity. This is an order or project-based temporary network environment, where dynamic re-configuration, responsiveness and flexibility, strategic planning, sharpen core competencies, cyber and global sourcing, etc., are supported by the ICT platform and teamwork. One of the key requirements of a VF is to develop and information system architecture to integrate and control the interoperability of the distributed, heterogeneous and concurrent systems in the participating companies. This information availability can enable to success of the concept of a plug-and-play virtual enterprise. An effective integration framework of information technology can support the communication exchange and sharing process data between the partner organizations.

This research describes the monitoring and management of a VF processes through ICT-enabled smart objects that contribute to update the VF partners’ process status information which also measure the performance of entire VF and manage each manufacturing process. This status information as received from


the smart objects is a kind of a network centric communication exchange and sharing data among the VF partners. Each participating companies of the VF have access right to the updated process information depending on the predefined roles and authentication. Updated process information is made available over the web-based platform that visualizes the real-time information. This visualization platform termed as dashboard user interface, displays the information in textual and/or graphical formats. An example network of process monitoring using smart objects is presented in this research work.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the co-funding of the European Commission in NMP priority of the Seventh RTD Framework Programme (2007-13) for the ADVENTURE project (ADaptive Virtual ENterprise ManufacTURing Environment), Ref. 285220. The authors also acknowledge the valuable collaboration provided by the project team during the research work.

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