iFactory: Cyber-Physical Factory that Mass Customizes Products

Professor Zhong, Runyang Ray   (Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) (for projects led by other university))

Huang Guoquan George   (Project coordinator)

36

2023-06-01

180000

iFactory: Cyber-Physical Factory that Mass Customizes Products

1) Industry 4.0 2) Smart Manufacturing 3) Digital Twin / IoT / CPS 4) MiC 5) Decision analytics

Production and ManufacturingBuilding and Construction

C7076-22G

Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) - Group Research Project 2022/2023

2022

On-going

1. To establish a digitization architecture for factories (DAF) for real-time data collection and sharing throughout production processes and operations. DAF provides a set of rules and methods that govern the functionality, organization, and implementation of factory physical and digital twins, and define their interrelationships. Smart digitization technologies and solutions such as Internet of Things (IoT) / Digital Twin (DT) / blockchain (BC) / cyberphysical systems (CPS) / Building Information Modelling (BIM) will be used to develop Industry 4.0-compliant core technologies and solutions for Hong Kong reindustrialization initiative. 2. To develop an intelligent factory operating system (iFOS) that provides common services and manages factory digital-physical twins and their networks through edge gateways. Smart digitization converts factory facilities into cyber-physical (meta) twins (MTs) which are hosted and networked through their gateways. This project proposes to innovate an intelligent factory operating system (iFOS) for factory gateways to manage the lifecycle of MTs and their networking through hardware, software and analytics. Common services include an Out of Order Execution (OoOE) mechanism for MTs to process their own task queues, cyberphysical visibility and spatial-temporal traceability for the OoOE mechanism to ""look around"" for uncertainty mitigation and multi-tasking synchronization. 3. To innovate iFactory configurations for mass customizing parts and end-products while controlling the level of WIP (Work In Progress) inventory with a particular focus on mass customized products and buildings. WIP inventory levels are usually high in mass customization because of large variety of parts and products of small and mixed production volumes. iFactory visibility and traceability are particularly cost-effective in tackling this challenge. iFactory will be configured in the contexts of 3D printing service centres, assembly work station, fixed-position assembly islands, and hybrid flow shops.