Evaluation of enabling RFID technology for operation visibility in an industrial plant

• Main Author: Karnik Rohit Ajit.
• Other Authors: Wang Dan Wei
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Applications of electronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/18827
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) develops high value manufacturing technology and human capital to enhance the competitiveness of Singapore’s manufacturing industry. It is a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*S TAR). For the purpose of reducing factory overheads, and to enhance the operation visibility within an Aviation industry MRO shop, SIMTech has identified Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a key technology, This will not only result in less number of process steps, but also enable the operation planner get real time updates an the location and processing of various components scattered within the workshop. However, before an expensive commitment to this technological change, the company needs to know how well the MRO shop will perform so that the cost and risk can be minimised. This dissertation aims to verify the proposed design of the technology implementation using proof, of-concept. This aim was accomplished by integrating hardware with emulation to highlight the efficiency of the Future State Model. Additionally, this research also aims to cater to data warehousing and systematic data collection of the large amount of RFID data. The comparison has indicated the large amount of components and industrial data in the both models. In addition, the bottlenecks in the shop were at the rework and re-planning stage in the event of a machine/process breakdown. In order to locate the individual components and parts that arc scattered all over the MRO shop floor, a large number of human resource needs to be activated and a lot of time needs to be invested. Furthermore, knowledge of the component processing had a significant impact on the performance of the MRO shop in the Future State Model. Finally, resources were more utilised in the Future State Model instead of being ‘idle’ in the Current State Model. From these findings, it can be concluded that some improvement can be made by introducing operation visibility in the shop, real lime update of component processing history and balancing the resource allocations.