How will they be controlled?

n 1850, farm workers made up 65% of the United States work force. Now, farm workers constitute less than 4% of the work force. Yet, the United States now produces more food per capita than ever in its history. Many believe this same trend is now happening in manufacturing. At the industrial revolutions peak, manufacturing workers made up 35% of the work force. Now manufacturing workers constitute less than 25% of the work force. As automation reduces manufacturing jobs, new service industry jobs are being created. These trends do not mean an end to U S . manufacturing any more than the industrial revolution meant an end to U.S. agricultural production. They do mean an end to manufacturing as we have known it. Gradually, manufacturing personnel will be fewer and more sophisticated, while manufacturing systems will become more and more automated. Ultimately, manufacturers will have substantially

unmanned factories, so as some have imagined it, they can turn the lights out on the factory floor. However, the road to lights out manufacturing is decades longer than many people originally thought.

Key technical thrusts

Most see computer technology as the central glue to future manufacturing systems. Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems will include: product design, actual manufacturing of the product, shipping, and even customer product support. The drive towards CIM has three key technical thrusts: flexible automation, information integration, and online optimization. Figure 1 shows how these three thrusts relate to a manufacturing facilitys generic activities. Developing these three thrusts should make manufacturers more lean and agile. This would result in dramatically shorter times-to-market, sharply reduced inventories, and substantially better coordination between manufacturing systems and the marketplace.

COMMANDS

INFO IN

1 I
1STORAGE

CONTROL

MATERIAL

M_ATM+
IN

Flexible automation
Fig. 1 The /SO generic activity model formanufacturingand three key thrust areas forCIM
The flexible automation thrust concerns how to increase a manufacturing systems flexibility for material transportation, material transforma-

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its own internal use, one group must often translate another groups information about the product. Another group then translates this information for its use, and so on. Each translation can introduce errors or inconsistencies. A single product model would eliminate redundancies and inconsistencies.

On-line optimization
Once we have collected all this information about our highly flexible manufacturing enterprise, what do we do with it? We use it to make more intelligent decisions, hopefully. Now multi-disciplinary teams can concurrently design the product and its production system. Design engineering can use concurrently available information from manufacturing to design products that are easier to manufacture and less costly. Facilities planning and finance can use concurrently available information about the product to design more efficient facilities. Factory control can use concurrently available information about manufacturing capabilities and production requirements to optimize the production process. We next consider the factory control issues of online optimization where electrical and computer engineers can play a pivotal role.

W
Fig. 2 Groups requiring product infomation tion, material storage, and material verification. Factory automation has historically meant product standardization and assembly-line type production. Now many see that manufacturing needs to be more market oriented. Market oriented manufacturers provide customers what they want, when they want it, at a desirable price and quality. To provide such tailored variety, manufacturing facilities must be highly flexible. They must flexibly transport materials wherever and however they are needed. Thus, in the future, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) may replace conveyor belts. Machines transforming raw materials into finished goods will also require increased flexibility. Dedicated equipment will no longer be acceptable. Manufacturing systems must be easy to re-configure, or be self-configuring. information using appropriate database systems, and to assure manufacturing data integrity. The manufacturing environment adds a special flavor to these standardization and open systems issues. (The manufacturing environment can be more harsh on electrical signals, affecting which computer networks and hardware to use. Manufacturing problems also require distinctive data structures and computer algorithms.) One important ongoing standardization issue is developing a generic or neutral product model for manufacturing (Fig. 2). Currently, different functional groups of a manufacturing enterprise have different information about products. The outside world may only care that this is Acme Co.s XYZ Toaster. Shipping may only worry about XYZs physical dimensions and weight. Finance may only want to know the toasters selling price and production costs, Engineering concerns itself with detailed technical specifications such as material type, electrical connections, voltage ratings, wiring diagrams, and so forth. Production may mostly care about angles to bend sheet metal, tolerances on different pieces, and the toasters manufacturing stages. Because this information is often redundant and maintained by different groups, it is also often conflicting. For

So how will these factories be controlled?

A s shown by the I S 0 Generic Activity Model (Fig. I ) , the reason information is translated into and out of the manufacturing domain, networked around a manufacturing system, processed, or stored in manufacturing databases is so it can be used to control the manufacturing facilities as they receive and ship materials, move materials around the facility, process those materials, inspect their processes, or store those materials in inventory. Consistent with Fig. 1, we define manufacturing control as the actuation of a manufacturing plant to make products, using the present and past observed state of the manufacturing plant, and demand from the market. This definition is broader than that typically given in an introductory engineering course in Controls, where simple devices are used to control small systems. This definition is more aligned with the lay usage of the term control and the intuitive connotation of what it means

Information integration
The number of manufacturing options will explode as manufacturing equipment and facilities become increasingly flexible. We must learn to intelligently use the resulting information flood. Electrical and computer engineers can help define the standards for computer systems to transport manufacturing information across networks, to transform manufacturing information using different computer algorithms, to store manufacturing

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to control a whole factory. Lets look at how factories are controlled. There are three basic types of algorithms that are used to control factories. These are dispatching algorithms, scheduling algorithms, and re-order point algorithms. Dispatching algorithms are used to determine which product to send where, when a manufacturing process becomes available. Scheduling algorithms are used to make manufacturing decisions in advance of the decisions implementation. Re-order point algorithms affect product manufacturing by requesting production when inventory is depleted to a given re-order point.

because the decisions they make usually only concern the machine at hand, not also what is happening at other machines. These theoretical problems practical ramifications can include long lead-times and high inventories in highly utilized factories.

Scheduling algorithms
A scheduling algorithm specifies what will happen on the factory floor for some time into the future. Scheduling algorithms can be used to obtain both spatial and temporal optimality, thus reducing lead-times and inventories in highly utilized factories. An advance schedule can also be desirable for other reasons. It can tell customers when orders should be completed. It can coordinate purchasing, tooling, inspection, employee work hours, and factory maintenance. Advance schedules can also show possible future problems such as a specific machine becoming overloaded. Academics and practitioners have proposed numerous scheduling algorithms. One well-known academic result shows optimally scheduling n jobs on m machines is an NP-complete problem. That is, the computer time required to solve such a problem grows exponentially as the number of jobs or machines increases. Thus, only a few simple scheduling problems can be optimally solved in reasonable time. As a result, in the real world schedules are often determined using heuristic methods instead of optimization methods. One type of heuristic scheduler popular in practice is called a simulation scheduler. With a simulation scheduler, a factory simulation is run as though simple dispatching rules controlled the factory. The resulting predicted factory behavior becomes the schedule. Like the dispatching systems on which they are based, such scheduling systems lack temporal and spatial optimality. But they provide factory activity coordination and possible future problem indication. Another popular scheduler in practice is called a forward/backward scheduler. Here each job i s taken oneat-a-time and placed at succeeding manufacturing operations forward in time. If a machine is unavailable, the j o b is shifted forward until that machine becomes available. If any job ends up being scheduled for completion after it is required by the customer, then

Dispatching algorithms
Dispatching algorithms can be used when any number of events happen in a factory. They can be used to decide when to let the manufacturing facility start working on the next job. They can be used to determine which machine to send a job to next. Dispatching algorithms are most commonly used to determine which job a machine should work on when the machine becomes available. Though many complex dispatching heuristics have been developed, the most common type of algorithm sorts all available jobs by a sort key, and takes the highest priority job. Commonly used sort keys (called dispatching rules) sort the jobs by due-date and take the job with the earliest due-date, or they sort the jobs by the amount of processing required in the next step and take the job that requires the least processing, or they sort the jobs by the amount of slack time before the job is due and take the job with the least slack-time. Dispatching rules provide maximum flexibility because decisions are made only at the last minute. So if, machines fail, jobs take longer than expected, market demand shifts to other products or product mixes, or new emergency jobs come into the manufacturing facility, plans do not have to be altered. There are no plans to alter. Yet dispatching algorithms suffer from major drawbacks often referred to as their lack of temporal and spatial optimality. Dispatching algorithms lack temporal optimality because they make current decisions without considering possible future events. Dispatching algorithms lack spatial optimality

it is backward scheduled from the customers due date, working backward from the last operation to be completed on the job to the first operation. Many variations on forwardhackward scheduling exist. Scheduling can be performed instead based on operations or machines. Also, schedules can be performed using very general time frames such as weeks or months, or they can schedule to the hour or minute. Some practical scheduling problems can be solved using mathematical programming techniques. A very popular research area uses expert systems for scheduling manufacturing systems. These schedulers are usually called Knowledge-Based Schedulers. Another related approach uses artificial neural networks. Still another idea is to develop capabilities for computer-based, online, real-time, dynamic scheduling.

Re-order point algorithms

Both dispatching and scheduling algorithms are referred to as push algorithms, because they both push jobs from stage to stage in the manufacturing system. This contrasts with re-order point algorithms, which are referred to as pull algorithms, because they pull jobs out of the manufacturing system. Re-order point algorithms are very simple and were among the earliest algorithms used for factory control. In these early systems, work-in-progress inventories were put in bins in a storage area. The bins were checked periodically and if inventory was depleted to a certain level, the item was re-ordered (pulled) from the manufacturing facility or possibly suppliers. Re-order point algorithms have experienced a rebirth with Toyotas success at using a re-order point system they developed, called a kanban, to control their automotive assembly lines. At Toyota, all production stages produce until inventory levels after each stage reach their prescribed levels. All production stops until someone pulls the inventory out of the system. At this time, the production stage that made that finished-goods-inventory starts production by pulling the inventory it needs to make the materials to replenish the finished-goods-inventory. T h e pulled inventory causes other inventory to be pulled, causing these production stages to start. If every production stage takes equal time, the system will go into full production every

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job shop

small batch

medium batch

large batch

repetitive

batch continuous process process

Product Variability (Nominally in Lot Size or Production Volume)

Fig. 3 A conjecture of what control algorithms best fit different manufacturing environments classified by variance

time a piece of finished goods inventory is pulled out of the system. A pull system has the advantage that if a machine breaks down or has problems, this does not cause excessive inventory to accumulate before it. Inventory is not produced until it is pulled. A problem does shut down the assembly lines lower stages, forcing everyone to focus on fixing that stages problems. As the manufacturing system is tuned to minimize shut downs, goods come to be produced only as needed! They are made Just-in-Time. Toyotas success with a re-orderpoint control system started a worldwide Just-in-Time manufacturing craze. Yet many manufacturers are attempting to use scheduling systems instead of re-order point systems to have products produced and delivered Just-in-Time. S o far it is hard to interpret the results. Manufacturers inventories have been down substantially over the last few years, though few manufacturers have gone to reorder point control. The recent economic downturn has made it difficult to tell if these reductions came from improved factory control or because lightly utilized factories are easier to control.

But they can be run on a computer and their results can be implemented automatically. The result is an automatically controlled factory. These different control algorithms perform differently, and the type of manufacturing environment in which they are used strongly affects their performance. Generally, to minimize inventories and maximize throughput, a pull system is preferred over a schedul-

ing system which is preferred over a dispatching system. However, a pull system requires set product types so when a standard inventory piece is pulled out of the system, it triggers production to replace that piece. Such a system would create massively idle inventories if each standard inventory piece was only used a few times a year. Yields, processing times, customer demand, product mixes, machinery down-time, and production levels all have to be relatively predictable to use a scheduling system. Virtually any manufacturing system can use a dispatching system, but these systems can cause high inventory levels and low throughput in highly utlized factories. Thus, manufacturing variances encountered by the manufacturing control algorithms seem to most strongly affect how well the control algorithms perform. It seems that different control algorithms perform best for different mixes of manufacturing variance (see Fig. 3). The most important variance seems to be the variety of products made by the factory. In practice, manufacturing control algorithms are usually mixed and matched. For example, often a scheduler sets general manufacturing objectives, however, to accommodate minor changes without rescheduling, jobs are

Manufacturingcomputercontrol architectures
These control algorithms have historically been implemented manually.
Fig. 4 A common MRP/MES architecture

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actually dispatched according to the due-dates given in the schedule. A manufacturing system controlled by a kanban will usually have a scheduling system to determine when to make different finished-products and to help coordinate production with outside suppliers. Also, many research projects have aimed at mixing a dispatcher with a pull system. These systems usually operate to restrict the number of a certain class of jobs in a manufacturing system until a job of that type is pulled out of the system. Such systems have had limited success due to the effects they can have on reducing machine utilization and job throughput. The way control algorithms are mixed and matched is usually referred to as a control architecture. An architecture is a specification of the interconnection of software modules that perform different functional tasks. Since this software is often large and complex, it usually will have to be implemented on multiple computer platforms. The software architecture generally limits the types of hardware architectures that can be used. The hardware will ultimately determine the softwares performance. Obviously, there is an important interplay between the hardware architecture and the software architecture it supports. A two-level hierarchy has evolved in practice (Fig. 4). Here a Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP) system schedules the factorys work, usually using fonvardlbackward scheduling algorithms. A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) implements the schedule using standard dispatching rules. Since dispatching rules require no global information to operate, a single MRP system can schedule for multiple MESs or a single MES can be distributed across the factory on personal computers. Thus, this architecture is a two-level hierarchy. Medium- and large-batch manufacturers have successfully implemented the MRPIMES paradigm. However, manufacturers with limited product variety are better off using a re-orderpoint control system. For them, the MRPMES architecture would provide inferior performance. The process industries also have their own unique factory control problems that require their own distinctive control architectures. Current MRP sys-

tems avoid schedulings inherent computational complexity by possibly oversimplifying the scheduling problems. (Often, MRP systems will schedule only to the nearest week or day.) Some will ignore capacity limitations. Also, it can be difficult to re-schedule with an MRP system if too many unforeseen changes happen on the factory floor. The point here is not that the MRPMES paradigm is bad, but that it may be a bad fit for some types of manufacturing situations. One such bad fit is small-batch manufacturing- manufacturing in lot-sizes of less than SO. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, small-batch manufacturing accounts for approximately 75% of all U.S. trade in manufactured goods. The number of different jobs in these systems can be so large as to overload a standard MRP scheduler. Also, often a small-batch manufacturer has less standardized production methods, making future operations more difficult to predict. A possible solution would make scheduling more dynamic by using a scheduling algorithm that can be distributed across multiple computers, One proposal is the Market-Driven Contract Net (Fig. 5). Here the advance schedule is determined by negotiations

between computers that represent different pieces of manufacturing equipment. Each computer then knows the schedule for its machines and it can implement this schedule using dispatching algorithms as before. For this scheduling system, the computation required for scheduling increases linearly with the number of jobs and machines being scheduled. Two technical issues critically determine a control architectures ability to control a given manufacturing system: the control algorithms fit to the given manufacturing system, and the control architectures design to maximize the computer systems performance for factory control. Electrical and computer engineers have pivotal expertise in computer architectures, decision sciences and control, software engineering, communications networks, databases, operating systems, and systems theory.

Research issues
What makes one control architecture better than another? The answer is definitely tied to the question of what makes one control algorithm better than another. A strong factor seems to be the manufacturing variances that the control algorithm must accommodate (e.g.,

robot

lathe

lathe

chucker

chucker

inventory
stores

Fig. 5 T e heterarchial market-drivencontract net architecture h

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lot-size variances, processing time variances, yield variances). But our list of such variances is incomplete and many variances on this list seem to be highly interrelated or possibly redundant. We need better scheduling algorithms: algorithms better suited for distributed computing, algorithms that deal better with larger numbers of jobs and algorithms that deal better with changes on the plant floor. Though re-order point algorithms are generally agreed to be better than scheduling algorithms for reducing lead-times and inventories, they need to be modified for small batch manufacturing. No one has satisfactorily determined a way to make this modification. Possibly, we not only need new and better control algorithms, but we may also need new and better control architectures. We need architectures that provide specialized services, and we need more interesting architectures to better understand our options. One major ongoing research issue in factory control is how to model a manufacturing system. The batch manufacturing processes are referred to a s discrete-event systems, because these systems are more driven by the event occurrences than time passage. The whole area of discrete-event systems modeling and analysis is a very active research area.

ably your best bet. The common way to find such a position is to look through journals and conference proceedings to decide whose research most interests you. You should then directly contact those individuals. Some key manufacturing journals and conferences include the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Conferences on Robotics and Automation, the IFAC/lFIP/IFORS Symposia on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing Technology, the Journal of Manufacturing Systems, and the SME AUTOFACT Conference. If you would like to work as a practicing engineer to automate factories, you can work as an in-house automation specialist for most manufacturing companies. You may instead choose to work for a company that specializes in factory automation. These companies are often referred to as Manufacturing Systems Integrators. According to some estimates, the manufacturing systems integration industry has been growing almost 20% per year over the last five years. Trade magazines that specialize in reporting Systems Integrators activities are Managing Automation magazine and Manufacturing Systems magazine.

Architecture, A U T O F A C T 9 2 , November 8- 12, 1992. Yu-Chi Ho, ed., Discrete Event Dynamic Systems Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1992. Lawrence Gould, Industry Insight: The Top 50 Systems Integrators, Managing Automation, Vol. 4, No. 12, December 1989, p. 45.

About the authors

Dr. Baker is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Cincinnati. There he teaches courses in systems theory and controls. His research is in automatic factory control. He has degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The University of Michigan, Rice University, and Harvard University in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration. Dr. Baker has worked in the Manufacturing Technology (Man Tech) Directorate of the United States Air Force, the Factory Control and Scheduling Group at the General Motors Technical Center, the Control Systems Laboratory at the GE Corporate Research and Development Center, and at the Corporate Headquarters of Cincinnati Milacron. Dr. Merchant is Senior Consultant at the Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Sciences (IAMS) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here he continues to do research, begun earlier in his career, on worldwide research in manufacturing. He spent 46 years at Cincinnati Milacron carrying out research in manufacturing, which in the very early years was focused primarily on research in the machining process. With the advent of the digital computer, that focus shifted to research on the potential of computer technology to automate and integrate the total system of manufacturing, and to the development and implementation of that potential worldwide. Following his retirement from Cincinnati Milacron, where he had risen to the position of Principal Scientist, he joined Metcut Research Associates as Director of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. After a few years, he moved to his current position at IAMS. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is one of the I8 full U.S. members of the International Institution for Production Engineering Research.
____

Read more about it

Michael Urquhart, The Employment Shift to Services: Where Did it Come From?, Monthly Labor Review, April 1984, pp. IS-22. Detlef K. Koska and Joseph D. Romano, Projile 21, Executive Summary, Countdown to the Future: The Manufacturing Engineer in the 21st Century Dearborn, MI: Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Fall 1988. J.H. Blackstone, Jr., D.T. Phillips, and G.L. Hogg, A State-of-the-Art Survey of Dispatching Rules for Manufacturing Job Shop Operations, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1982, pp. 2745. Y. Monden, Toyota Production System. Norcross, GA: Industrial Engineering and Management Press, 1983. C.R. McLean, M. Mitchell, and F. Barkmeyer, A Computer Architecture for Small-Batch Manufacturing, IEEE Spectrum, May 1983, pp. 59-64. A.D. Baker, Case Study Result5 with the Market-Driven Contract Net Manufacturing Computer-Control

Practical issues
Manufacturers cannot wait for these issues resolution before automating their plants. For any automatic system to work, it must run using accurate information about the manufacturing facilitys status. Thus, important ongoing work includes accurate data collection systems and easy to use computer-human interface designs. Practicing electrical and computer engineers can provide valuable assistance when determining which control system and vendor to use in a given manufacturing situation. They have key expertise that can be used to select the right computer platforms, operating systems, network protocols, database systems, and programming languages, and so forth.

Getting involved
If you would like to research new ways to automate factories, a university position or a position at a government or industry research laboratory is prob-

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