Level of Automation Decision for Transportation Operations in Production – LADTOP

This project is proposed in the context of the Industry 4.0. It more directly concerns the introduction of new technologies from robotics and information & communication science in the workshops for internal logistics operations. For next generation production systems, mastering the internal logistics is still a crucial issue. Its related costs are far from being negligible regarding the operating costs in classic industries. And its influence on workshops performance through the mastering of physical flow is critical. The transportation activities are also known to be painful for humans and sometimes hard to automate. Although automatic transfer system exists, for example in microelectronics plants to convey wafers, it is possible to assume that nowadays a huge part of the transfer operations are poorly automated. One interesting question is to fully understand how the decision to automate or not the internal logistics operations is made. Additionally, with the new possibilities brought by industry 4.0 and namely by full connectivity of production actors, it is important to renew the question of automating some of the transportation operations, with production context & state aware systems.
The arrival of industry 4.0 concepts changes the historical considerations around LoA (Level of Automation). New technologies are offered to automatically perform some physical actions, with better set up time (“plug and produce” approach) and with automated decision of action thanks to a broader knowledge of the productive environment (“Internet of things” (IoT) applied in production system). Industrial resources such as machines and transportation systems are being used more intelligently taking advantage of the shop floor connectivity. Associated to this technical point of view, the collaboration between operators and robots must also be rethink since they are supposed to have deeper interactions in their activities. These new aspects of the industry of the future have to be integrated in a methodology to design and implement suitable and relevant internal logistics systems.
It is ambitioned in the project to analyze the added value of communication strategies between the transportation system and the production system and the cooperation to be defined with operators. The flexibility, efficiency, and robustness of these systems shall be analyzed. Namely, the performance of a production system equipped with a mixed transfer system combining operators and connected automated transporters, in presence of unexpected events will be addressed. In this project, it is proposed to deeply analyze the design of internal transportation systems for production sites, through the prism of LoA decision. The ambition is to deliver a design and decision process to make sound automation decision for transportation activities for various industrial contexts. Alongside, to a detailed design approach, it appears very relevant to also propose best practices. For example, it seems valuable to describe generic scenarios (relevant representative industrial case) with their associated recommended practice in term of design.
This project will use 2 types of validation and experimentation field. The first will be the use of an operations management emulation platform currently developed in our lab. The second will be experiments at industrial partners’ plants.
The global objective of the project can be summed up as developing a methodology to implement internal logistics system for manufacturing plants in an industry 4.0 context, based on an analysis of the relevant Level of Automation.