A Support System to Manage Product and Process Changes in Manufacturing

Different kinds of technological data are continuously generated in manufacturing enterprises, concerning the production of specific products. Especially in small enterprises, these data usually arc not stored in a centralized knowledge management system. Thus, SMEs have difficulties in reusing the knowledge deriving from previous products when a new product has to be produced. Starting from the analysis of the technological data available in manufacturing enterprises, a model is designed to support the structuring of the manufacturing knowledge. It was also provided a classification of the possible changes in the manufacturing process that can be seen as variation to a previous product and thus can be managed more efficiently. In fact, changes in the components or in the production operations can be done more easily starting from the knowledge of a previous product instead of redoing from scratch. The usage of the proposed management system will allow a more easy evaluation of different product and process alternatives from the point of view of the final cost. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.