A collaboration between scientists in India, Portugal, and the UK, has used social network analysis to solve the problem of industrial plant layout design. The approach allows the optimization of location and connectivity of personnel, jobs, and resources to make the plant as efficient as possible. The team uses maximum completion time of a job (makespan), resource utilisation, and throughput time to evaluate system performance in this context. Overall the approach offers a new way to move forward with plant design in the context of “industry 4.0”.
Industry 4.0 is a phrase used to refer to the subset of the fourth industrial revolution and encompasses areas that are not normally classified as an industry, such as smart cities but more commonly is used to discuss industrial plant or factories that use machines and robots connected wirelessly to controllers and sensors and ultimately networked to allow the personnel hierarchy to view processes and production at different levels and to make decisions based on their purview.
M.L.R. Varela of the University of Minho, in Guimarães, Portugal, Vijay Kumar Manupati of NIT Warangal, in Telangana, Suraj Panigrahi of VIT University, in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India, and Eric Costa Research of the Solent University in Southampton, UK (also at INESC Technology and Science, in Porto, Portugal) discuss details in the International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
“The experimental results revealed that the proposed SNA approach supports to find the key machines of the systems that ultimately lead to the effective performance of the whole system,” the team writes.
Varela, M.L.R., Manupati, V.K., Panigrahi, S., Costa, E. and Putnik, G.D. (2020) ‘Using social network analysis for industrial plant layout analysis in the context of industry 4.0‘, Int. J. Industrial and Systems Engineering, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp.1-19.