No abstract

Industry 4.0 aims to ensure the future competitiveness of the manufacturing industry by providing Companies with the ability to react to rapid product changes and disturbances, efficiently and reliably, through re-configurability. In this paper, we explore the value creation process within Industry 4.0, with special emphasis on its relationship with mass customization and the sustainability issue. Based on the identified research gaps and opportunities derived from a literature review of relevant concepts, we propose the development of the Customer-Product-Process-Resource (CPPR) 4.0, a comprehensive framework that puts the value proposition-creation-capture cycle proper of an Industry 4.0 environment, in the context of a manufacturing organization’s customer-product-process-resources views. The usefulness of the proposed framework is exemplified by using it to derive system dynamics model of the mass customization paradigm. A discussion of the managerial implications of the obtained results for both the sustainability and the case of Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is offered at the end of the paper.

No abstract

No abstract

Industry 4.0 aims to ensure the future competitiveness of the manufacturing industry, where one of the major challenges faced by its implementation is the manufacturing/production system robustness (that is, able to perform in the presence of noise), as they may not be able to absorb input disruptions without bending or breaking. In this paper we propose to use the Max-Plus algebra approach to study the propagation of manufacturing disturbances (i.e., processing time variations), presenting a case study and performing a sensitivity analysis, with the idea of understanding under which conditions disturbance propagation takes place. Findings show that the impact propagation depends on where the variation source is located within the manufacturing system. Two are the main original contributions of this paper: the use of Max-Plus algebra to study the impact propagation of processing time variations and a four-step methodology to derive the equations representing the deterministic manufacturing system.