A smart factory solution to hybrid production of multi-type products with reduced intelligence

Personalized consumption demand and global challenges such as energy shortage and population aging require flexible, efficient, and green production paradigm. Smart factory aims to address these issues by coupling emerging information technologies and artificial intelligence with automation to implement cyber-physical production system. Shop-floor entities can be interconnected with each other and with cloud and client terminals through industrial network and Internet. This framework incorporates self-organization of smart physical entities and big data based feedback and coordination to achieve both high flexibility and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a framework for smart factory. Especially, we focus on developing a solution, including negotiation mechanism for dynamic reconfiguration and strategy for deadlock prevention, for hybrid production of reduced-intelligence products. As hybrid production can process multi-type products concurrently in arbitrary order, and reduced-intelligence products are equipped with cheaper product memory such as bar codes, QR codes, or RFID tags instead of more expensive embedded controllers, this solution is flexible, efficient, and economic for producing customized products.