SYNCHRONOUS PRODUCTION AND INTRALOGISTICS OF SMART ASSEMBLY CELL LINE UNDER GRADUATION INTELLIGENT MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

Assembly cell line (ACL), derived from the Toyota production system, first sprouted in some leading electronics companies. In this unique layout, the conveyor line is divided into assembly cells (ACs) and each AC stores a certain number of parts that allow the multi-skilled worker to complete the entire product assembly at their own pace. With the penetration of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies, the smart ACL can leverage the strengths of humans and machines and flexibly reconfigure to rapidly respond to personalized requirements. Despite the promising benefits of ACL, the inherent instability of manual work and the complex manufacturing environment full of uncertainties not only pose challenges to the full play of ACL performance but also make it difficult to synchronize production operations with material supply (i.e. intralogistics), resulting in unnecessary waiting or even downtime that ultimately lead to lower productivity. This paper proposes a real-time data-driven productionintralogistics synchronization (PiLS) under the Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System (GiMS) to ensure smooth production of ACL while considering production dynamics and uncertainties. Firstly, the problem description of PiLS in ACL is given. To solve this problem, an improved Graduation Manufacturing System (GMS) with real-time information feedback loops is introduced to integrate production activities and form adaptive control for production dynamics and uncertainties. After that, an information-sharing architecture based on smart gateway systems is designed to connect manufacturing resources with human integration and create twinned digital representations, resulting in the seamless integration of physical and digital twins to form meta-twins. On this basis, GMS is upgraded to GiMS to ensure PiLS implementation in smart ACL through real-time information visibility, traceability, and feedback control enabled by meta-twins. Finally, the main contributions and future work are given.