Development of a dynamic data interchange scheme to support product design in agile manufacturing

Lean and agile manufacturing for work-in-process (WIP) control

Distributed data processing is becoming a reality. Businesses want to do it for many reasons, and they often must do it in order to stay competitive. While much of the infrastructure for distributed data processing is already there (e.g., modern network technology), a number of issues make distributed data processing still a complex undertaking: (1) distributed systems can become very large, involving thousands of heterogeneous sites including PCs and mainframe server machines; (2) the state of a distributed system changes rapidly because the load of sites varies over time and new sites are added to the system; (3) legacy systems need to be integrated—such legacy systems usually have not been designed for distributed data processing and now need to interact with other (modern) systems in a distributed environment. This paper presents the state of the art of query processing for distributed database and information systems. The paper presents the “textbook” architecture for distributed query processing and a series of techniques that are particularly useful for distributed database systems. These techniques include special join techniques, techniques to exploit intraquery paralleli sm, techniques to reduce communication costs, and techniques to exploit caching and replication of data. Furthermore, the paper discusses different kinds of distributed systems such as client-server, middleware (multitier), and heterogeneous database systems, and shows how query processing works in these systems.

Manufacturing leanness and agility are requirements of today’s manufacturing systems. Leanness call for a best fit of the manufacturing systems to products, therefore requiring product oriented manufacturing systems (POMS). Manufacturing agility can be achieved through easy systems reconfiguration to fit changing manufacturing requirements, which may mean dynamically configuring POMS. For this a suitable design system is required. Due to complexity of this design, and to the need for using suitable design methods, which may not be available locally, distributed sources of design services can be used. This paper presents and describes a prototype of a Distributed Design system for POMS based on a POMS design methodology and distributed suppliers of design services.

In this chapter, we describe the case study of a real-time database system for a specific kind of operational data generated by an agile manufacturing system. The term agile manufacturing refers to a manufacturing system that can fabricate various products simultaneously without long downtimes for retooling. The agile manufacturing increases competitiveness of companies in the market by decreasing the downtime and reconfiguration overhead incurred due to product changes. The agile manufacturing concept is already in a stage of practical use in some companies, for example, pager manufacturing at Motorola [19], or customized bicycles from Panasonic [5].

Agile manufacturing, a recently popularized concept, has been advocated as the 21st century manufacturing paradigm. Markets become highly diversified and global, and continuous and unexpected change, become the key factors for success. The need for a method of rapidly and cost­ effectively developing products, production facilities, and supporting information technology has led to the concept of agile manufacturing. Agile manufacturing requires enriching of the customer, cooperating with competitor organizing to manage change, uncertainty and complexity; and leverage people and information. The key enabler of agile manufacturing include: i) virtual enterprises formation, ii) physically distributed teams, iii) integrated business information system. This framework as a basis for understanding the major strategies and relevant tecnnologies of agile manufacturing (AM).

Adopting key lessons from agile manufacturing to agile software product development—A comparative study

Energy is an important factor in today's industrial environment. Pump systems account for about 20% of the total industrial electrical energy consumption. Several studies show that with proper monitoring, control and maintenance, the efficiency of pump systems can be increased. Controlling pump systems with intelligent systems can help to reduce a pump's energy consumption by up to one third of its original consumption. The research in this paper was carried out in the scope of a research project which involves modelling and simulation of pump systems. This paper focuses on the future implementation of modelling capabilities in PLCs (programmable logic controllers). The whole project aims to use a pump itself as the sensor rather than introducing external sensors into the system, which would increase the cost considerably. One promising approach for an economic and robust industrial implementation of this intelligence is the use of PLCs. PLCs can be simulated in multiple ways; in this project, Codesys was chosen for several reasons which are explained in this paper. The first part of this paper explains the modelling of a pump itself, the process load of the asynchronous motor with a control system, and the simulation possibilities of the motor in Codesys. The second part describes the simulation and testing of a system realized. The third part elaborates the Codesys system structure and interfacing of the system with external files. The final part consists of comparing the result with an earlier Matlab/SIMULINK model and original test data.

The current database market is fairly evenly split between shared nothing and data sharing systems. While shared nothing systems are easier to build and scale, data sharing systems have advantages in load balancing. In this paper we explore adding data sharing functionality as an extension to a shared nothing database system. Our approach isolates the data sharing functionality from the rest of the system and relies on well-studied, robust techniques to provide the data sharing extension. This reduces the difficulty in providing data sharing functionality, yet provides much of the flexibility of a data sharing system. We present the design and implementation of Chimera -- a hybrid database system, targeted at load balancing for many workloads, and scale-out for read-mostly workloads. The results of our experiments demonstrate that we can achieve almost linear scalability and effective load balancing with less than 2% overhead during normal operation.

A heterogeneous database management system combines multiple dissimilar models of data within a single integrated system. The objective is to allow a user to access data independently of how it is actually organized. For example, a user may access a database as though it were stored relationally (i.e., in tables) [CODD70], even though it is actually stored as a CODASYL/DBTG or network database [CODA71]. In addition, different subpieces of the database may be organized under different data models. The heterogeneous database system must present these to the user as an integrated whole. The user's model of his data may be different from any of the models chosen to implement it.Rather than construct a new database system from scratch, we are interested in constructing a heterogeneous system out of existing systems. The key difficulties with this approach are: (1) the formulation of database design methods that are applicable to a variety of different data models, and (2) the development of techniques to translate programs and data between dissimilar data models. In this paper, we briefly describe how high level abstraction has been applied to these problems. The use of abstraction in database systems is related to the application of abstraction techniques in programming languages and artificial intelligence research.

Naturally, data processing requires three kinds of resources:

Companies in either manufacturing or servicing have to be restructured or re-organized in order to overcome with challenges of the 21st century in which customers are not only satisfied but also delighted. In this competitive environment, organizations should use a flexible, adaptive and responsive paradigm that can be entitled by a unique term: agile manufacturing (AM). An AM system is able to develop a variety of product at low cost and in a short time period. For this, it has some of useful enabling technologies and physical tools. Among these, concurrent engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of product and their related processes, including manufacture and support. It is then a useful and beneficial approach to reduce the development time and manufacturing cost, while simultaneously improving the quality of a product in order to better respond to the customer expectations. The aim of this study is to underline the synergistic impact of new product development (NPD) and CE, (which can be called CNPD), and to survey their methods and tools in association with the AM.

In a previous JDM issue, one of the Associate Editors issued a challenge to database researchers to “...encourage us to think about innovation and point out areas that ... are not only important but also open to innovation.†(Pirkul, 1995, p.33). In this editorial, I address one area that Pirkul explicitly identified as a topic for innovation, namely, Heterogeneous Databases. Below I present a novel framework for understanding Heterogeneous Databases and Database Systems. This framework identifies three dimensions of heterogeneity: the “Why†?, “How†?, and “What?†of heterogeneous database systems. I claim that exploring answers to these three questions will help practitioners (1) identify heterogeneous application requirements and map them to appropriate database capabilities, (2) evaluate heterogeneous application techniques that fulfill these necessary requirements, and (3) select products that support the required techniques.

Several aspects are given of the Remote-Exchange project at USC, which focuses on the controlled sharing and exchange of information among autonomous, heterogeneous database systems. The spectrum of heterogeneity which may exist among the components in a federation of database systems is examined, and an approach to accommodating such heterogeneity is described. An overview of the Remote-Exchange experimental system is provided.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Modularization of products gives many benefits for different functions within a manufacturing company, both for manufacturing and for other business functions and processes. In this paper, common terms and methods used in product management and managing the product variety are presented. The main objective in this paper is to increase understanding of the concept of modularization on product design. It is described the special characteristics of the project business to the products and their modularity. In the empirical part a preliminary model for analysing the degree and form of modularisation in products is created. The core idea is to analyse and describe dimensions of the existing modularity of the product. Finally this analysis is applied to some key modules of recovery boilers.

Database technology is of great variety, structure diversity, solving data integration and exchanges sharing of the heterogeneous database system have became the important problem in all fields. Because of XML is the very important data exchange technology to realize data exchange and transmission ability, this paper mainly explores the data exchange problem how to use XML in heterogeneous database system, , and .Net platform have good support to XML and heterogeneous database system, so the combination of XML and.net, can realize data exchange of heterogeneous database system.