Authors:
Joost Bottenbley
and
Alexander Brodsky
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, Virginia, U.S.A.
Keyword(s):
Decision Support, Decision Guidance, Optimization, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Product Design, Service Network.
Abstract:
A major deficiency in the manufacturing ecosystem today is the lack of cloud-based infrastructure that supports the combined decision making and optimization of product design, process design, and supply chain, as opposed to hard wired solutions within silos today. The reported work makes a step toward bridging this deficiency by developing a software framework, prototype and a case study for SPOT - a decision guidance system for simultaneous optimization and trade-off analysis of combined service and product networks, capable to express the combined product, process and supply chain design. SPOT allows users to express, as data input, a hierarchical assembly and composition virtual products and services, i.e., having fixed and control parameters that can be optimized. Virtual services produce a flow of virtual products, such as raw materials, parts of finished products. Like the virtual services, they are associated with analytic models that express customer-facing performance metri
cs and feasibility constraints, which are used for optimization. The uniqueness of our approach in SPOT is the use of modular simulation-like model for product and service networks, yet optimization quality and computational time of the best available mathematical programming solvers, which is achieved by symbolic computation of simulation code to generate lower-level mathematical programming models.
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