Digital factory for collaborative production systems

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provide information management and analysis to industrial companies and support their planning activities that are currently based on theoretical values (averages) of parameters like the amount of WIP at different production cells, lead times of different operations and machine load and not on the actual, real shop floor data. This can considerably disturb the planning activities as WIP are taken into account and the machine load can heavily affect the lead times. Sharing data between manufacturers, suppliers and customers becomes very important to fulfil the expectations of the market. This paper proposes software solutions to address these requirements and methods to automatically capture the necessary corresponding shop floor information and compares different technologies like RFID, image and voice processing.