Digital Shop Floor Management: A Practical Framework For Implementation

In the context of manufacturing, shop floor management (SFM) is employed to ensure efficient production operations and workflows. Advanced technologies and methods can be used to improve the SFM and achieve close to real-time responsiveness. Even though there is a number of research available for the digitalized SFM (DSFM), a supportive framework for implementation purposes was not considered yet. Consequently, this paper utilizes concepts from related disciplines and research areas to derive an architectural framework for a DSFM. This particular architecture is then implemented to ensure its practicability and foster the understanding of challenges and opportunities. The proposed multi-layer framework and supportive methods can be employed by manufacturing companies to implement a DSFM focused on interoperability, security and low-latency.