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

- An RFID-enabled social manufacturing system (RFID-SMS) is developed to deal with real-time monitoring and dispatching of inter-enterprise integrated production and transportation tasks.
- Three service packages of RFID-SMS are studied in detail, including RFID data services package, real-time monitoring services package, and decision support services package.
- The integrated production and transportation task dispatching problem is modeled and solved by a three-step optimization method integrating teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO).

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-/medium-sized 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.