An Integrated Framework for Dynamic Manufacturing Planning to Obtain New Line Configurations*

With an increase in demand for individualized and personalized products, manufacturers are turning their attention to more flexible manufacturing systems that can be rapidly reconfigured, based on needs. However, the existing approaches primarily rely on manual reconfiguration performed or managed by subject-matter experts, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To this end, we propose an integrated framework that generates multiple feasible configurations, conducts simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed configurations, and performs a multi-objective optimization to derive a set of ordered solutions from which the manufacturer may select their desired option. The framework consists of three core components: Digital Twin Pool, Application Plane, and Decision Maker. The DT pool consists of DTs grouped together based on functionalities. The individual DT request required information from different applications in the Application Plane. The applications include a semantic-based ontology map for knowledge representation and storage, and a simulation application for simulating generated line configurations to obtain necessary attribute values such as throughput, yield, cycle times, etc. The Decision Maker includes an optimizer, which takes multiple configurations obtained from the DT pool and runs a multi-objective optimization. The output of the Decision Maker is a set of feasible solutions that will be provided to the user. A case study is presented to demonstrate the efficacy and usefulness of the proposed framework.