André Thomas

André Thomas, Damien Trentesaux, Paul Valckenaers

This editorial introduces the special issue of the Springer journal, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, on intelligent distributed production control. This special issue contains selected papers presented at the 13th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing - INCOM'2009 (Bakhtadze and Dolgui, 2009). The papers in this special issue were selected because of their high quality and their specific way of addressing the variety of issues dealing with intelligent distributed production control. Previous global discussions about the state of the art in intelligent distributed production control are provided, as well as exploratory guidelines for future research in this area.

Philippe Thomas, Hind Bril El Haouzi, Marie-Christine Suhner et al.

In recent times, the manufacturing processes are faced with many external or internal (the increase of customized product rescheduling , process reliability,..) changes. Therefore, monitoring and quality management activities for these manufacturing processes are difficult. Thus, the managers need more proactive approaches to deal with this variability. In this study, a proactive quality monitoring and control approach based on classifiers to predict defect occurrences and provide optimal values for factors critical to the quality processes is proposed. In a previous work (Noyel et al. 2013), the classification approach had been used in order to improve the quality of a lacquering process at a company plant; the results obtained are promising, but the accuracy of the classification model used needs to be improved. One way to achieve this is to construct a committee of classifiers (referred to as an ensemble) to obtain a better predictive model than its constituent models. However, the selection of the best classification methods and the construction of the final ensemble still poses a challenging issue. In this study, we focus and analyze the impact of the choice of classifier types on the accuracy of the classifier ensemble; in addition, we explore the effects of the selection criterion and fusion process on the ensemble accuracy as well. Several fusion scenarios were tested and compared based on a real-world case. Our results show that using an ensemble classification leads to an increase in the accuracy of the classifier models. Consequently, the monitoring and control of the considered real-world case can be improved.

Emmanuel Zimmermann, Hind Haouzi, Philippe Thomas et al.

The purpose of this study is to investigate an approach to group lots in batches and to schedule these batches on Acta-Mobilier cutting work-center while taking into account numerous constraints and objectives. The specific batching method was proposed to handle the Acta-Mobilier problem and a mathematical formalisation and genetic algorithm were proposed to deal with the scheduling problem. The proposed algorithm has been embedded in software to optimise production costs and emphasis the visual management on the production line. The application is currently being used in Acta-Mobilier plant and shows significant results

Mélanie Noyel, Philippe Thomas, Patrick Charpentier et al.

Product quality level is become a key factor for companies' competitiveness. A lot of time and money are required to ensure and guaranty it. Besides, motivated by the need of traceability, collecting production data is now commonplace in most companies. Our paper aims to show that we can ensure the required quality thanks to an "on-line quality approch" and proposes a neural network based process to determine the optimal setting for production machines. We will illustrate this with the Acta-Mobilier case, which is a high quality lacquerer company.