RFID-enabled social manufacturing system for inter-enterprise monitoring and dispatching of integrated production and transportation tasks

In today's manufacturing environment, manufacturers need to handle unprecedented and diverse customer requirements swiftly. An efficient way is to collaborate with various stakeholders such as micro-/small-/mediumsized enterprises, factories, workshops, logistics service providers, public warehouse providers, and even individuals, forming a social media-based community. The vital factor to enable this way is the efficient real-time monitoring and dynamic dispatching of inter-enterprise production and transportation tasks. This work deals with the social manufacturing trend and proposes an radio frequency identification-enabled social manufacturing system (RFID-SMS) to realize the real-time monitoring and dispatching of inter-enterprise production and transportation tasks. Firstly, RFID devices are systematically deployed in each enterprise's job-shops and transportation vehicles to collect real-time production and transportation data. Then, these data is processed to monitor task progress and states, which is helpful to manage the inter-enterprise production processes. To deal with the unexpected disturbances, dynamic dispatching decisions for inter-enterprise production and transportation tasks are made by the manufacturer to win high flexibility and efficiency. Furthermore, a prototype is developed and a case is implemented in a printing machinery company, and the feasibility of the proposed system and models are evaluated by the practical industrial data from the company. It shows that RFID-SMS can improve the inter-enterprise production transparency under mass individualization. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.