Employing Smart Units and Servitization towards Reconfigurability of Manufacturing Processes

AbstractIncreasing environmental concerns together with the need for sustainable consumption and production gave birth to the concept of product service-system. This paperwork presents how the concept of product-service systems (PSS), also known as servitization, can increase performance within the value creation chain in the manufacturing environment by deployingits key features within smart manufacturing units to provide them withreconfigurabilityproperties. Highlights on how thekey feature of a product-service system can be used to enable the deployment of reconfigurability within smart manufacturing units towards achieving the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems are revealed in the first part of the paper.Considering the new economic models, the ever changing society needs and the effects of disruptive innovations, a business model for manufacturing environmentis further proposed. The business model deploys small scale reconfigurable manufacturing systems by means of smart manufacturing units, intelligent information management platforms, cloud computing services and Internet of Things. An experimental test bench is afterwards presentedin this context. Three similar manufacturing scenarios are considered and reproduced viaa mix ofsix smart manufacturing units and interfaces. The goal of these scenarios isto test the feasibility of servitization towards achieving reconfigurability of smart units.Several industrial equipment among which a dual-arm industrial robot, two electro-mechanical grippers, two electro-mechanical axes and two proximity sensors areintegrated with the embedded system to enable the deployment of PSS features. Also, how servitization is deployed within available smart units, their generic architecture and how they are interconnected is presented in the paper,together with advantages and constraints of the proposed experimental approach. The paper ends with conclusions, remarks regarding the experimental tests and further research directions