Smart manufacturing and factory digitization : is embracing a CPS-isation process really worth it ?

The today’s manufacturing dimension stands on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the one which promises to marry the worlds of production and network connectivity, opening to a new age of technological innovation and outstanding performances. The Cyber Physical Systems are the new manufacturing paradigm’s enablers: they are intelligent systems that smartly intertwine the physical factory floor with the cyber computational space, to sense the changing state of the real world and enable a flawless enterprise control and optimization. It’s no idle boast to claim that Italy is one of the few countries worldwide where the required conditions for the fourth industrial revolution deployment do exist. Such consideration founds its basis on two remarkable aspects: despite of the on-going economic relaunch, still in place after the deep crisis that affected the country, Italy keeps preserving the role of one of the most competitive European manufacturing industry sectors (the second biggest manufacturing country after Germany; through years, the Italian manufacturing excellences have been shaped upon a wide network of Small-to-Medium Enterprises mainly, that find in manpower, expertise, passion and cultural heritage their strongest values. Knowledge is the real problem; Italian and, generally, European companies demonstrate a serious lack of awareness towards the impressive benefits the in-factory Cyber Physical System implementation generates. The missing knowledge encourages an organizational inertia, widespread among companies that don’t believe in the clear, concrete potentialities of such revolutionary technology application. Most of the industrial realities just hear about the CPS acronym, and before embarking in such a kind of IT investment, they try to catch some vague, unclear, sometimes contrasting and misleading opinions from other players, and thoughts get even more confused. European companies must learn how to exploit the changes due to the Industy 4.0 revolution. Therefore, this Master Thesis research goal is to start from the qualitative analysis of every single detail concerning the development of the seamless integration between physical assets and computational elements, in a scalable CPS architecture for adaptive and smart manufacturing systems, progress in advanced control, reality modelling and simulation, data analytics and self-configuration; then, our project is intended to conceive a thoughtful line of direction the company follows to embrace the CPS dimension. The Master Thesis aims at answering to the following questions: what are the economic and operating drivers or performances of a manufacturing company the CPS implementation impacts on? The final step is to come up with a structured framework that will support the company throughout the path to CPS-ization. The Master Thesis starts from a literature-based CPS definition deployment, going through the explanation of the constitutive aspects qualifying the technology. Then, the second part of the work entails the creation of an articulated Breakthrough Taxonomy: it reports and thoroughly categorizesevery single all the identified breakthroughs related to the way the in-factory Cyber Physical System implementation strikes off the boundaries between the real and the virtual world. In the final chapter, the Logical Fixture describing a stepwise framework that drives the company through the “CPS-ization process” is presented. This section sees the Logical Fixture articulation around its constitutive linking rings: the first linkage aims at identifying the performance indicators a company can adopt to assess the impact of every CPS implementation breakthrough the aforementioned Taxonomy reports; the second linkage opens to a complete description of the World Class Manufacturing as a set of tools the company willing to CPS-ize needs, to eliminate evident inefficiencies and achieve the ideal process conditions for a CPS implementation; the third linkage helps in identifying all those company production areas the CPS implementation will have a positive impact.