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Publications (185)
The circular economy is a system aimed at eliminating waste and promoting the continual use of resources. It represents a shift from the traditional linear economy to one that is restorative and regenerative by design. Despite its potential benefits, the perceived complexity and resource requirements can discourage manufacturing SMEs from adopting...
The economic impact of Structural Health Monitoring Systems based on optical fibre sensors is assessed in the development of composite helicopter rotor blades. Hence, the focus of this analysis is on the helicopter’s Beginning Of Life stage. Two applications of the Structural Health Monitoring System are considered in the development of composite b...
Monitoring the integrity of aeronautical structures is fundamental for safety. Structural Health Monitoring Systems (SHMSs) perform real-time monitoring functions, but their performance must be carefully assessed. This is typically done by introducing artificial damages to the components; however, such a procedure requires the production and testin...
Structural Health Monitoring Systems (SHMS) are currently widely investigated in the literature, however, their application to the aerospace industry is still limited. One of the reasons lies in the lack of methods aimed at evaluating their economic impact on the lifecycle of the structural element to be monitored [1]. In this work the economic imp...
Occupational safety is a critical aspect of the manufacturing sector, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises , which often face a safety divide compared to large companies due to significant differences in resources and awareness. Digital solutions can provide interesting support for dealing with specific hazardous situations and improvi...
The objective of this chapter is to describe the strategic action line related to evolving and resilient production (LI6). In particular, this chapter proposes research and innovation priorities aimed at exploiting a high degree of machine automation and self-learning, with levels of autonomy and adaptive intelligence designed to facilitate the ope...
Monitoring the integrity of aeronautical structures is fundamental for safety. Structural Health Monitoring Systems (SHMS) perform real-time monitoring functions, but their performances must be carefully assessed. In this work the damage detection performances of a strain-based SHMS, were evaluated on a composite helicopter rotor blade root. The SH...
Small and medium enterprise (SME) manufacturers are impeded from participating in sustainability initiatives using new technologies due to the high cost and the lack of clarity on where to start. The integration of low-cost digital solutions has enabled SME manufacturers to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies to support operations. However, using low-c...
Industrial services are increasingly becoming more relational and customer-oriented, due to manufacturers’ adoption of servitisation approaches and product service system offerings. Challenges remain regarding the effective design and delivery of these new offerings, and the understanding of their actual value for both providers and customers. This...
Digitisation offers manufacturing companies new opportunities to improve their operations and competitiveness in the market by unleashing potentialities related to real-time monitoring and control of operating machines. Through condition-based and predictive maintenance, the knowledge about the health state and probability of failure of the machine...
This Special Session seeks original manuscripts in order to investigate the design and management of smart manufacturing systems compatible with Industry 4.0/5.0 principles and technologies. It also seeks to exploit mathematical models, algorithms and techniques, automation and digitalization technologies, management methods and approaches as well...
The current work contributes to stochastic hybrid flow shop scheduling. After a thorough literature analysis, it is firstly evident that works on stochastic flow shop scheduling are still limited in number; moreover, they often rely on simplifying assumptions; eventually, they may lack in a full viability for industrial application of the proposed...
Smart factories build on cyber-physical systems as one of the most promising technological concepts. Within smart factories, condition-based and predictive maintenance are key solutions to improve competitiveness by reducing downtimes and increasing the overall equipment effectiveness. Besides, the growing interest towards operation flexibility has...
The world is witnessing an all-level digitalization that guides the industry and business to a restructuration in order to adapt to the new requirements of the surrounding environment. That change also concerns the labour of the technical professionals and their formation. As a consequence of this deep consciousness-raising, this chapter will inves...
Editorial of A special issue on
This paper focuses on the proposal of a framework for a servitization model applied on an asset centered environment – including production machines as the physical assets – and populated by micro-services as the means to deliver the asset-related services. The asset centered servitization is, for many production machines manufacturers, a core valu...
Recently, the increasing lack of raw materials is forcing the manufacturing sector in revising the internal operating and strategic activities to embrace Circular Economy (CE) principles thus, moving towards Circular Manufacturing (CM). CE principles are pursued during product design, product realisation, as well as product end-of-life. As an enabl...
Nowadays, manufacturing firms need the reconfigurability capability to be responsive in the current context characterised by unpredictable and frequent market changes and the reduction of product life cycle. Despite the relevance of the subject, a challenge for practitioners is the development of a strategy aimed to increase the level of reconfigur...
There have been tremendous developments in theories and technologies in control for smart systems. In this paper we review applications to various systems that are crucial for the future of smart cities, for example enterprise and manufacturing systems, transportation systems, energy systems, and data centres. Beyond discussing the existing technol...
Digital technologies are becoming more pervasive and industrial companies are exploiting them to enhance the potentialities related to Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Indeed, PHM allows to evaluate the health state of the physical assets as well as to predict their future behaviour. To be effective in developing PHM programs, the most crit...
In the recent years, manufacturing companies are investing in sensors and information systems to implement condition-based maintenance (CBM), thus pursuing the benefits of digital transformation. Nevertheless, to implement CBM as advanced digital system, significant investment should be made to gather and manage all needed data from different sourc...
Maintenance is evolving due to the double-sided influence of the Asset Management paradigm and digitalization. In this evolution, assessing the maintenance management process status in terms of process completeness, information and data completeness and integration is paramount to boost reliable data-driven decision-making. Grounding on Design Scie...
The implementation of Industry 4.0-like solutions for the maintenance of production assets is a relevant topic in the mainstream for researchers and industries around the world. As a matter of facts, the technology-based transformation of maintenance has been germinated since several years. In fact, the evolution of maintenance along with the devel...
In smart factories, guaranteeing shopfloor-synchronised and real-time decision-making is essential to be responsive to the ever-changing internal environment, namely the shopfloor of the production system and assets. At operational level, decisions should balance counter acting objectives of maintenance and production; therefore, their decision-mak...
Maintenance and Industrial Asset Management (AM) are fundamental business processes in guaranteeing the availability of physical assets at minimum risk and cost, while balancing the interests of several stakeholders. To reach operational excellence, intra- and inter-enterprise interoperability of systems is needed to support information management...
The world is witnessing an all-level digitalization that guides the industry and business to a restructuration in order to adapt to the new requirements of the surrounding environment. That change also concerns the labour of the technical professionals and their formation. As a consequence of this deep consciousness-raising, this chapter will inves...
The discipline of Asset Management (AM), which focuses on the management of physical assets in an integrated and holistic way along their life cycle, can be adopted by companies to promote sustainability since it enhances asset reliability and availability for the whole duration of its usage. Within the manufacturing industry, a relevant AM-related...
Maintenance is a key process contributing to sustainable manufacturing operations. According to this vision, recent scientific studies underline the need for indicators to assess maintenance sustainable performances. In the normative field, the EN 15341:2019 standard about Key Performance Indicators of the Maintenance Function was recently released...
Since its inception in 1978, the IFIP Working Group (WG) 5.7 on Advances in Production Management Systems (APMS) has played an active role in the fields of production and production management. The Working Group has focused on the conception, development, strategies, frameworks, architectures, processes, methods, and tools needed for the advancemen...
The current uncertain and volatile business context is challenging firms worldwide, leading to the need to be responsive at a competitive cost. This trend is so substantial that it even affects industries traditionally competing in rather stable contexts, such as the process industry. Although the process industry includes multiple sectors with dif...
Purpose
The purpose of this work is to investigate industrial asset management (AM) in manufacturing. After depicting gaps for AM in this sector, the role of information as a key dimension is considered to realise a summary of challenges and advices for future development.
Design/methodology/approach
The work is grounded on an extensive systematic...
Research on scheduling problems is an evergreen challenge for industrial engineers. The growth of digital technologies opens the possibility to collect and analyze a great amount of field data in real-time, representing a precious opportunity for an improved scheduling activity. Thus, scheduling under uncertain scenarios may benefit from the possib...
Nowadays, one important challenge in cyber-physical production systems is updating dynamic production schedules through an automated decision-making performed while the production is running. The condition of the manufacturing equipment may in fact lead to schedule unfeasibility or inefficiency, thus requiring responsiveness to preserve productivit...
This paper summarizes a vision of the challenges facing the so-called “Industry of the Future” as studied by the research community of the IFAC Coordinating Committee 5 on Manufacturing and Logistics Systems, which includes four Technical Committees (TC). Each TC brings its own vision and puts forward trends and issues important and relevant for fu...
The capability to predict the behaviour of machines is nowadays experiencing a tremendous growth of interest within Industry 4.0-based manufacturing systems. The route to this end is not straightforward when Run-To-Failure (RTF) data are poorly available or not available at all, thus a strategy must be properly defined. In this proposal, assuming n...
The paper aims at proposing a card controlling model to improve the standard CONWIP procedure, granting a similar system throughput while reducing Work In Progress (WIP) levels. To achieve this objective, the authors developed a Digital Twin-based production control system including a reinforcement learning algorithm (i.e. Q-Learning). The Digital...
Planning maintenance strategies in advance with respect to the installation and running of manufacturing assets positively affects operational expenditure during their usage. However, the early stages of the asset lifecycle are poor of operational data. Thus, domain knowledge of experts, related to the asset, the process and production requirements...
The innovative concept of Social Internet of Industrial Things is opening a promising perspective for collaborative prognostics in order to improve maintenance and operational policies. Given this context, the present work studies the exploitation of historical and collaborative information for on-line prognostic assessment. In particular, while ai...
The present work considers information and data as a cornerstone for an effective Circular Manufacturing (CM). Focusing on complex industrial assets it also postulates the relevance to develop CM strategies having both the perspective of the Original Equipment Manufacturer, or asset provider, and the asset user. In this scope, a particular emphasis...
This research proposes a new conceptual model of the IT ecosystem required in the scope of global asset management. To accomplish this aim, the functionalities required by maintenance management are integrated with those required by Asset Management needs, thus extending the current scope of work of extant IT systems to a lifecycle management persp...
Circular economy (CE) has been recently considered one of the most promising sustainable strategies for industrial companies, aiming at reducing resources consumption, extending resources life cycle and making recirculate resources within the life cycle stages. The transition from a linear economy towards a circular one requires the internal reorga...
This investigation studies advanced practitioners of maintenance management and seeks to uncover the related impacts and contributions of best practice maintenance toward sustainable manufacturing operations. This exploratory research conducted a novel empirical analysis focused on maintenance functions in nine manufacturing companies from diverse...
Industry 4.0-based manufacturing systems are equipped with Cyber-Physical Systems that are characterized by a strong interlinkage between the real world and the digital one: actions in one world have an impact on the other. In this paradigm, Digital Twins (DT) are defined as simulation models that are both getting data from the field and triggering...
Spare parts are key operational assets in order to minimise unexpected equipment downtimes that may significantly impact a company’s results. The spare parts supply chain network supports the entire spare parts operations management and it is essential to achieve the planned goals. However, most of the traditional literature on spare parts manageme...
This paper proposes an empirical study aimed at characterizing the evolution of a company towards a sustainable manufacturing strategy, with a special emphasis on the role played by the business functions in the industrial organization. Within the study a methodology to evaluate and rank the sustainable manufacturing strategy in different productio...
This book explored the concept of ‘value-based asset management’ in depth and breadth. We recognise that the reader might find the range of issues covered by the book too daunting, and might wish to focus only on those parts and chapters that seem most relevant to their research or practice. Therefore, the aims of this final chapter are two-fold. F...
This chapter introduces those terms and concepts that we consider fundamental for the reader to understand the rest of the book. It provides a background and introduces a generalized framework providing relevant dimensions of value-based and intelligent asset management. Firstly, understanding the value that an asset can provide and how value-based...
This chapter presents the deployment of a condition monitoring system on an electric arc furnace in a steel making company, ranging from the development of the system until its implementation and the results achieved by its use in the plant. A step-wise risk-based methodology is introduced and it is adopted to deploy the condition monitoring system...
The Digital Twin (DT) is one of the main concepts associated to the Industry 4.0 wave. This term is more and more used in industry and research initiatives; however, the scientific literature does not provide a unique definition of this concept. The chapter aims at analyzing the definitions of the DT concept in scientific literature, retracing it f...
The aim of this chapter is to investigate how to embed Asset Management in production companies. A framework is defined based on literature analysis and focus groups findings, in which the fundamentals to guide the integration of Asset Management are systematized. Two dimensions are identified—the asset life cycle and the hierarchical level of the...
The fundamental motivation of this book is to contribute to the future advancement of Asset Management in the context of industrial plants and infrastructures. The book aims to foster a future perspective that takes advantage of value-based and intelligent asset management in order to make a step forward with respect to the evolution observed nowad...
The emergence of new technologies is providing new ways to compete in the current context of changeable and unpredictable market requirements. The focus of this paper is on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), as one of the most promising transformative technological concept of such a context, thus considered by literature as the building blocks of futur...
The Industry 4.0 is pushing a fast evolution in all manufacturing operations under heterogeneous aspects. Maintenance, in all its numerous declinations along the life cycle of a production asset, is no exception. A myriad of decisions need taking—often on short time horizons, involving different physical and technological domains, and with limited...
Nowadays, maintenance activities and safety management can be supported by a mature state of the art favouring the implementation of condition-based maintenance programme, which recommends maintenance decisions based on the information collected through asset life. The main idea, which grounds in the Industry 4.0 paradigm, is to utilize the asset d...
Asset Management (AM) is increasing in attention among researchers and practitioners since it aims at creating an integrated and holistic methodology to manage physical assets, as production systems or machineries. The development of such holistic methodology is founded on several AM fundamentals, which are: asset control levels (operational, tacti...
Reconfigurable manufacturing, providing capacity and functionality on demand, is an ever more important factor of competitiveness in volatile, unpredictable, and rapidly changing markets. In this regard, scalability and convertibility are considered particularly relevant characteristics, as they directly reduce reconfiguration effort and enhance sy...
Asset Management (AM) is promising for value creation from assets in the long term. A major concern to this end relates with the capabilities to achieve effective AM decision-making at every organisational level, i.e. operational, tactical, and strategical. Therefore, the goal of this research, grounded on a systematic literature review, is to iden...
This paper proposes a methodology to drive from a strategic point of view the implementation of a predictive maintenance policy within an industrial plant. The methodology integrates the evaluation of system performances, used to identify the critical components, with simulation and cost analysis. The goal is to evaluate predictive maintenance impl...
Information and data management is nowadays a central issue to support the Asset Management (AM) decision-making process. Manufacturing companies have to take different decisions along the asset lifecycle and at different organisational levels, and, to this end, they require proper information and data management. In the literature, besides the cru...
This paper proposes a methodology to build a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model aimed to support decision-making for manufacturing asset lifecycle management. Existing challenges for TCO adoption in industry are identified through literature review and through an explorative multiple case study involving eight manufacturing companies. Based on it,...
In today's competitive global environment, manufacturers are offered unprecedented opportunities to build hyper-efficient and highly flexible plants, towards meeting variable market demand, while at the same time supporting new production models such as make-to-order (MTO), configure-to-order (CTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO). During the last coupl...
Manufacturing companies are experiencing the fourth industrial revolution characterised by the introduction of new technologies into production equipment, such as the Cyber Physical Systems and the Digital Twin simulations. Companies are then challenged by the digitization of products and production systems information, which leads to new potential...
This paper proposes a performance evaluation model for production systems considering: i) the need of a factory-level performance metric tracking system effectiveness and ii) the need of ex-ante performance evaluation models for buffered multi-state systems. Potentialities of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) calculation approach and reliabilit...
The present research illustrates a Digital Twin Proof of Concept to support machine prognostics with Low Availability of Run-to-Failure Data. Developed in the scope of the Industry 4.0 Lab of the Manufacturing Group of the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, the Digital Twin is capable to run in parallel to the drilling machine operation...
The recent advances in digital technologies are revolutionizing the industrial landscape. Maintenance is one of the functions that may benefit from the opportunities that emerge with the digital transformation of industrial processes. Nevertheless, until now very few research papers investigated on what digitalized manufacturing entails for mainten...
The management of the End of Life phase of the lifecycle of industrial assets is more and more a relevant issue for companies dealing with aging assets. This paper provides a conceptual model that includes different aspects that should be considered by a comprehensive methodology to support an informed decision-making process in this regard. In par...
This research focuses on responsiveness in high variety manufacturing environments. To achieve it, the article proposes to develop Dynamic Response Capabilities (DRCs) of the manufacturing system defined as the abilities to readjust the planned operating parameters of workload, capacity, and lead time, in the wake of disturbances. To inform their d...
The aim of this article is to investigate how to embed asset management in production companies. A framework is defined based on literature analysis and focus groups findings, in which the fundamentals to guide the integration of asset management are systematized. Two dimensions are identified—the asset life cycle and the hierarchical level of the...
The present paper proposes a methodology to assess the values created through the development of an E-maintenance platform. This is based on the postulation that the platform is providing a set of services developed as an application of a set of E-technologies to support targeted maintenance processes within a given company. Henceforth, the applied...
The advanced use of the Information and Communication Technologies is evolving the way that systems are managed and maintained. A great number of techniques and methods have emerged in the light of these advances allowing to have an accurate and knowledge about the systems’ condition evolution and remaining useful life. The advances are recognized...
This paper outlines the base concepts, materials and methods used to develop an Industry 4.0 architecture focused on predictive maintenance, while relying on low-cost principles to be affordable by Small Manufacturing Enterprises. The result of this research work was a low-cost, easy-to-develop cyber-physical system architecture that measures the t...