Digital Thread Enabled Manufacturing Automation Towards Mass Personalization

Manufacturing industries are moving towards mass personalization, which refers to the rapid production of individualized products, with large scale efficiencies. This shift from push-type mass customization to pull-type mass personalization will pose critical operational challenges to manufacturing businesses, with complexities ranging from effective requirements elicitation to design, manufacturing, commissioning and after-sales support. Aiming at addressing these challenges, a feasible operational framework for enabling efficient manufacturing automation for mass personalization is proposed in this paper. A key element of this operational framework is the Digital Thread, which streamlines information flow associated with design, manufacturing, maintenance and servicing of a personalized product, each of which are represented as Digital Twins. An As-Designed Digital Twin is created from the beginning of the product co-design process, which then evolves into the subsequent design and manufacturing process and systems resulting in As-Designed Digital Twin evolving to As-Planned Digital Twin and then to As-Built Digital Twin. The personalized product, after it’s commissioning and installation constitutes the As-Maintained Digital Twin of the product, which stores product data related to field performance. The data exchange and communications between these Digital Twins that reside in the various departments of the organization and the management systems create a seamless Digital Thread, capturing the lifecycle information of each personalized product. Personalized product is proposed to be developed through a self-organizing shopfloor, working on a multi-agent mechanism and controlled by a central agent control algorithm, which can coordinate and provide individualized process plans. The Digital Twins, interlinked by a Digital Thread and realized by a self-organizing shopfloor, thus result in increased level of automated control in engineering and manufacturing. To validate the feasibility of this proposed framework, we tested the information flow in the Digital Thread with a case study in the construction industry. Finally the challenges faced by such an automation framework and the area of future work are also discussed.

HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT OF SECTIONAL TYPE MASS HOUSING IN RUSSIA

The history of typological development of apartment houses of sectional type is considered as the most complex, constantly developing housing on the territory of Russia. Particular attention is paid to the search for economical sectional houses with small apartments for further mass construction and experimental design work for the sett lement and their introduction in the pilot demonstration and experimental construction of the 9th and 12th microdistricts of Moscow. The system of stage-by-stage development of mass housing in the territory of Russia is disclosed until the 1990s. and in subsequent periods. It is proposed to single out six main stages in the development of mass housing with the defi nition of characteristic features for each stage. The euphoria of the construction of residential apartments and houses which was observed in the 90’s. has passed and at the present time the seventh stage in the development of residential buildings is being formed but this stage requires its solution and comprehension.