Graduation manufacturing system: synchronization with IoT-enabled smart tickets

In the context of card-based control systems (CCSs), simple and effective control for hybrid flow shop are lacking. This paper aims at filling the gap by presenting a new CCS—graduation manufacturing system (GMS) by analogy to the ticket queuing system of graduation ceremony. Firstly, three kinds of tickets, namely the job tickets (JTs), setup tickets (STs) and operation tickets (OTs) are designed for controlling work in process, setup and preventing disturbances respectively. Secondly, to realize the automatic data collection and material flow control, internet of things-enabled smart gateways and smart tickets are developed. The smart gateways and smart tickets work together to automatically generate, dispatch and use the three kinds of tickets. Thirdly, mobile cloud services for scheduling and execution are presented to provide the real-time mobile visibility, facilitate decision-making for supervisors and daily operations for workers. Finally, mechanisms and scheduling methods for optimizing the production synchronization are proposed under GMS.