Digital factory : real time information system implementation in a traditional manufacturing environment

Abstract

The Internet and emerging technologies such as RFID have been making profound impacts on operations of traditional manufacturing companies. Advances in these fields have opened up possibilities for significant improvements in process, productivity, quality, and communication. The ability for a company to keep up with current technology trends directly affects the company's ability to achieve customer satisfactions, ability to maintain competitive advantages and ability to accomplish its financial targets. Digital factory is a project that Hamilton Sundstrand piloted to investigate how its new 787 component assembly lines can take full advantages of existing technologies. A RFID based prototype solution was developed. Key functionalities include real time work-in-progress monitoring, digitized work instruction display and automated Andon response. The prototype demonstrates that a practical sophisticated infrastructure can be built with widely available equipment and tools. Real challenge in full scale deployment of digital factory will be to identify functionalities that are truly critical to production needs and implement those in a practical fashion so that they can become an integral part of production system.