Industry 5.0, seen as the successor to Industry 4.0, is characterized by a focus on human-machine collaboration, resilience, and sustainability concepts. This paper delves into the exploration of enabling technologies that facilitate the evolution of both I4.0 and I5.0, in the context of supporting supply chain (SC) logistics. The paper defines the principles of Logistics 5.0. The conventional logistics framework necessitates innovative solutions grounded in emerging I5.0 technologies capable of capturing and processing extensive datasets to empower decision-making based on the information. The research critically analyzes these enabling I5.0 technologies, assessing their application status through real-case scenarios within SC Logistics 5.0. Furthermore, the paper identifies research gaps in the reviewed technologies, outlining promising areas for each I5.0 technology. This guidance aims to direct future studies towards the practical application of technologies in supporting Logistics 5.0.
15 January 2016 in International Journal of Production Management and Engineering
Collaboration is a trend in supply networks management, based on the jointly planning, coordination and integration of processes, participating all network entities. Due to the current characteristics of uncertainty in the markets and economic crisis, there is a need to encourage collaboration tools to reduce costs and increase trust and accountability to market requirements. This study presents an overview of the research carried out in the H2020 European Project: Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks (C2NET), which is directed towards the development a cloud platform that consist of, optimization tools, collaboration tools to support and agile management of the network. The collaborative cloud platform allows to collect real time information coming from real-world resources and considering all the actors involved in the process. The collaborative cloud provides real time data gathered from the entire network partners in order to improve their decision-making processes.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation of a Fleet Management System (FMS) that plans and controls the execution of logistics tasks by a set of mobile robots in a real-world hospital environment. The FMS is developed upon an architecture that hosts a routing engine, a task scheduler, an Endorse Broker, a controller and a backend Application Programming Interface (API). The routing engine handles the geo-referenced data and the calculation of routes; the task scheduler implements algorithms to solve the task allocation problem and the trolley loading problem using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) depending on the problem size. The Endorse Broker provides a messaging system to exchange information with the robotic fleet, while the controller implements the control rules to ensure the execution of the work plan. Finally, the Backend API exposes some FMS to external systems.Design/methodology/approach: The first part of the paper, focuses on the dynamic path planning problem of a set of mobile robots in indoor spaces such as hospitals, laboratories and shopping centres. A review of algorithms developed in the literature, to address dynamic path planning, is carried out; and an analysis of the applications of such algorithms in mobile robots that operate in real in-door spaces is performed. The second part of the paper focuses on the description of the FMS, which consists of five integrated tools to support the multi-robot dynamic path planning and the fleet management.Findings: The literature review, carried out in the context of path planning problem of multiple mobile robots in in-door spaces, has posed great challenges due to the environment characteristics in which robots move. The developed FMS for mobile robots in healthcare environments has resulted on a tool that enables to: (i) interpret of geo-referenced data; (ii) calculate and recalculate dynamic path plans and task execution plans, through the implementation of advanced algorithms that take into account dynamic events; (iii) track the tasks execution; (iv) fleet traffic control; and (v) to communicate with one another external systems.Practical implications: The proposed FMS has been developed under the scope of ENDORSE project that seeks to develop safe, efficient, and integrated indoor robotic fleets for logistic applications in healthcare and commercial spaces. Moreover, a computational analysis is performed using a virtual hospital floor-plant.Originality/value: This work proposes a novel FMS, which consists of integrated tools to support the mobile multi-robot dynamic path planning in a real-world hospital environment. These tools include: a routing engine that handles the geo-referenced data and the calculation of routes. A task scheduler that includes a mathematical model to solve the path planning problem, when a low number of robots is considered. In order to solve large size problems, a genetic algorithm is also implemented to compute the dynamic path planning with less computational effort. An Endorse broker to exchanges information between the robotic fleet and the FMS in a secure way. A backend API that provides interface to manage the master data of the FMS, to calculate an optimal assignment of a set of tasks to a group of robots to be executed on a specific date and time, and to add a new task to be executed in the current shift. Finally, a controller to ensures that the robots execute the tasks that have been assigned by the task scheduler.
This paper focuses on the investigation of a new efficient method for solving machine scheduling and sequencing problems. The complexity of production systems significantly affects companies, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which need to reduce costs and, at the same time, become more competitive and increase their productivity by optimizing their production processes to make manufacturing processes more efficient. From a mathematical point of view, most real-world machine scheduling and sequencing problems are classified as NP-hard problems. Different algorithms have been developed to solve scheduling and sequencing problems in the last few decades. Thus, heuristic and metaheuristic techniques are widely used, as are commercial solvers. In this paper, we propose a matheuristic algorithm to optimize the job-shop problem which combines a genetic algorithm with a disjunctive mathematical model, and the Coin-OR Branch & Cut open-source solver is employed. The matheuristic algorithm allows efficient solutions to be found, and cuts computational times by using an open-source solver combined with a genetic algorithm. This provides companies with an easy-to-use tool and does not incur costs associated with expensive commercial software licenses.