(1) At present, it is important to bring the latest technologies from industrial practice into the teaching process of educational institutions, including universities. The presented case study addresses the application of educational games in virtual reality to the teaching process in a university environment. (2) The study took place at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Žilina in Žilina and consisted of two phases. In the first phase, students’ satisfaction with current teaching methods was examined. The second phase focused on an educational game in virtual reality, which introduced a non-traditional approach for teaching lean management, namely the tool 5S. (3) This game was designed by the study authors and created in the Godot game engine. The educational game was provided to students during class. After completing the game, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The aim was to enable students to express their opinion on the educational game and to identify the main benefits of this approach in the teaching process. (4) In the study’s final phase, based on the acquired knowledge, the authors examined the benefits and disadvantages of virtual reality educational games for the teaching process of industrial engineering tools.
The article presents the results of machine backup designing in reconfigurable industrial processes. The development of manufacturing systems is moving towards intelligent, automated, autonomous, and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Factories that want to ensure long-term sustainable and competitive manufacturing processes must be designing their processes to respond flexibly to changing changes in customer requirements. The article’s introduction characterizes concepts such as cold backup and warm backup machines and indicators relationship as the time between faults and repairs. The materials and methods describes prerequisites as the creation of the product family creation and resource availability with many formulas, simulation models, and its verification for the creation of the family products in the results of this article. The results describes the results from the calculations of the backups and family products of their use in reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The developed methodology for line design uses the principles of reconfiguration in designing configurations regarding advanced approaches in factories. A significant milestone will be the rapid integration of disruptive technologies and approaches into manufacturing systems. The complexity of future manufacturing systems in the Factories of the Future will only be possible with new innovative factory technologies using the digital twin.
The long-term sustainability of the enterprise requires constant attention to the continuous improvement of business processes and systems so that the enterprise is still competitive in a dynamic and turbulent market environment. Improvement of processes must lead to the ability of the enterprise to increase production performance, the quality of provided services on a constantly increasing level of productivity and decreasing level of cost. One of the most important potentials for sustainability competitiveness of an enterprise is the continuous restructuring of production and logistics systems to continuously optimize material flows in the enterprise in terms of the changing requirements of customers and the behavior of enterprise system surroundings. Increasing pressure has been applied to projecting manufacturing and logistics systems due to labor intensity, time consumption, and costs for the whole technological projecting process. Moreover, it is also due to quality growth, complexity, and information ability of outputs generated from this process. One option is the use of evolution algorithms for space solution optimization for manufacturing and logistics systems. This method has higher quality results compared to classical heuristic methods. The advantage is the ability to leave specific local extremes. Classical heuristics are unable to do so. Genetic algorithms belong to this group. This article presents a unique genetic algorithm layout planner (GALP) that uses a genetic algorithm to optimize the spatial arrangement. In the first part of this article, there is a description of a framework of the current state of layout planning and genetic algorithms used in manufacturing and logistics system design, methods for layout design, and basic characteristics of genetic algorithms. The second part of the article introduces its own GALP algorithm. It is a structure which is integrated into the design process of manufacturing systems. The core of the article are parameters setting and experimental verification of the proposed algorithm. The final part of the article is a discussion about the results of the GALP application.
Continuous cost reduction is a subject of interest for almost every production company. The cost reflects the competitiveness and sustainability of the business. Many company costs are linked to the effectiveness of production. One such cost is the work-in-progress (WIP) inventory cost. The present article deals with the design of a system for calculating the optimal WIP inventory stored in a manufacturing buffer, which, in the long term, provides the lowest costs. The main goal of the article is to design a new system that allows for the calculation of the optimal capacity of interoperation manufacturing buffers and thus the calculation of the optimal WIP inventory, which influences the lead time and cost. The newly designed system consists of algorithms that describe various steps, many of which use mathematical models. The individual blocks of algorithms are described, and the proposed system is verified and validated by simulation of the production line in the automotive production company.
10 September 2021 in International Journal of Simulation Modelling
This paper focuses on the sustainability of material flow and intralogistics in factories, two of the primary keys to productivity. In the past ten years, there has been significant interest in the sustainability of intralogistics to increase productivity. The aim of this article is to investigate the consequences of combining two factories into one, followed by the design of new material flows and intralogistics from a long-term perspective and with respect to sustainability. Therefore, this paper outlines sustainability variants of new material flow solutions in factories. Our methods and approaches were chosen because they represent one of the most rapid ways to rationalise material flows and intralogistics in factories to sustain this concept. In comparison with other projects that eliminate problems in the short term, we have focused on the overall long-term and sustainable concept of intralogistics and material flows over the next 10 to 15 years. Our approach has the potential to increase productivity intralogistics and its long-term sustainability. The proposed variants were verified and evaluated using visTable®touch software (v.2.7, plavis GmbH, Chemnitz, Germany). On the basis of these results, the rational variant of material flows was chosen for the factory. This variant has the highest overall improvement of 25%, even after the implementation of factory two into factory one.