At present, worldwide manufacturing industry is very varied. In automated production lines, the state-of-art is to perform quality controls on the final product at the end of the production line on 100% of production, overcoming traditional Statistical Process Control (SPC). Furthermore, reliability tests are performed on statistical basis on production samples. At the same time all automated machines include sensors to monitor performance and run feedback control loops. In the meanwhile, simpler production environments continue to exist, where most operations are human-based including quality controls; a very limited numbers of sensors are used, hence data are lacking. Indeed, understanding and controlling the quality in complex multi-stage manufacturing systems goes beyond the capacity of the model driven approaches and requires the right quantity and quality of meaningful data, in order to extract relevant information and build-up useful knowledge. Therefore, the simplest production environments should evolve to acquire the minimum required amount of data while the advanced ones should optimize the use of the already available data for an effective implementation of Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM). Moreover, today, data coming from quality controls are not used in real-time for production process control and vice versa: they are usually processed together as vertical silos in a multistage process, mainly off-line at the level of SPC.
GO0D MAN addressed all this complexity through the deployment of a Zero Defects Manufacturing framework based on smart inspection tools, intelligent agents, an ICT infrastructure for data collection, transmission and mining and advanced data analysis tools.
The GO0D MAN architecture and its components have been successfully deployed and validated in three industrial production lines and the reached impacts are the following:
- Increasing of the number of quality control stations distributed in order to have a multi-stage production line with a decreased number of repaired products at the end of the production line.
- Reduction of production costs.
- Increased production flexibility.
- Reduction of waste and scrap
- Wide adoption of the new strategies in the existing manufacturing systems in particular related to data analysis and knowledge managements from local to global level.
For each use case, specific quantitative and qualitative KPIs have been computed and analysed, showing that benefits that can be obtained through the adoption of the ZDM concept and the deployment of the GO0D MAN architecture.
