Infrastructure for Model Based Analytics for Manufacturing

Multi-resolution simulation models of manufacturing system, such as the virtual factory, coupled with analytics offer exciting opportunities to manufacturers to exploit the increasing availability of data from their corresponding real factory at different hierarchical levels. A virtual factory model can be maintained as a live representation of the real factory and used to highly accelerate learning from data using analytics applications. These applications may range from machine level to manufacturing operations management level. While large corporations are already embarking on model based analytics initiatives, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may find it challenging to set up a virtual factory model and analytics applications due to barriers of expertise and investments in hardware and software. This paper proposes a shared infrastructure for virtual factory model based analytics that can be employed by SMEs. A demonstration prototype of the proposed shared infrastructure is presented.