Grant: Alliance Grants

The fourth industrial revolution, commonly known as Industry 4.0, offers new challenges to the manufacturing industry. This project aims to address some of these challenges through a collaboration between Ryerson University and Axiom Group Inc. Axiom Group specializes in thermoplastic injection molding of various components and assemblies, and has developed a real-time production monitoring system called Smart Attend. Smart Attend collects data from machines and offers quick reports on production expectations vs. actual performance, cycle-time analysis, shift-to-shift benchmarking, and up to three years of production analysis among other features. Smart Attend is also fully integrated with PRISM, Axiom's in-house enterprise resource planning/material requirements planning (ERP/MRP) system. Through collaboration with Ryerson University, Axiom Group would like to enhance the capability of its Smart Attend and PRISM systems by incorporating state-of-the-art methods of data science and operations research for real-time production scheduling in the context of Industry 4.0. This model will optimize production schedules considering operational parameters and production disturbances, such as a machine failure. We will demonstrate the validity of this model in a real manufacturing setting as a market-ready production scheduling solution. It is expected that the proposed solutions will be embedded in the Smart Attend/PRISM systems and offered to the market as a commercialized product. The proposed solutions will also enhance the availability and overall efficiency of manufacturing machinery in an Industry 4.0 setting, reduce downtime costs and production loss due to failure, minimize the chances of human error, and enhance production performance and energy efficiency. This collaboration has enormous potential benefit to the Canadian manufacturing industry and provides the opportunity for a highly experienced team to translate their knowledge into a useful innovation.