Abstract:
Discrete manufacturing (DM) is characterized by individual or separated unit production and thus applied in many segments due to its quick responsiveness to market and customer requirements. This paper focuses on reporting the design and development of a Physical Internet (PI)-enabled smart factory for discrete manufacturing. PI-enabled manufacturing management system (PIM2S) is designed to collect real-time data from manufacturing factories by using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, to facilitate the database design, as well as to interact with other systems by a middleware standardized interface. A case study is introduced to describe how PIM2S helps a DM company to improve its shop-floor management.