Industry 4.0: Development of a multi-agent system for dynamic value stream mapping in SMEs

As the next wave of productivity, Industry 4.0 aims to enhance the competitiveness and efficiency of manufacturers by bridging the gap between industrial manufacturing and information technology. Through digitalisation, it provides the advantage of enabling the real-time/near-real-time monitoring of manufacturing. This digital information allows monitoring tools such as Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to help the decision makers efficiently capture the non-value-adding processes on the factory floor. However, the application of VSM into small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), including diverse manufacturing environments, is not an easy task. It is even more challenging especially when the product processing is more complicated and requires improvements to labour management and facility utilization. Conventional VSM is not competent to handle the contemporary rapid dynamic manufacturing environment, complex material flow or efficiency of machine and labour performance. These three are the most important resources on the shop floor to bring transparency to the decision maker. We present a multi-agent system composed of several cost effective embedded Arduino systems as agents and a Raspberry-Pi as a core agent. Equipped with Cyber-Physical System (CPS) technology, these agents, placed on or near the station, can reflect the non-linear material value flow without modelling the process or using RFID tags. Moreover, through the sensor node installed in each machine and by knowing the staff ID, the agents could send the relevant information in the form of dynamic value stream mapping (DVSM) in near-real-time for storage, analysis and visualization. We present a suitable visualization tool based in Node-RED to carry out DVSM.