Design of a Demonstrator Environment for Investigating Multi-Factory Production and Operation Challenges

Demonstrators, testbeds and learning factories enable researchers to investigate important manufacturing challenges and to trial solutions without disrupting industrial production facilities. In this way, solutions and systems can be developed close to a 'production-ready' state prior to industrial deployment. This paper reviews demonstrators and testbeds developed for smart manufacturing in the last 20 years. A key observation is that such demonstrators have predominantly focused on emulating single or multiple closely connected operations. Such developments reflect the activities of a single production facility and/or organisation. In contrast, there are few reports on demonstrators which seek to replicate the behaviour and challenges associated with multi-site factories or integration with existing legacy factory systems. To address this gap, a multi-operation demonstrator has been created. The demonstrator aims to replicate coordinated production between multiple small manufacturing sites and provides a testbed to investigate operational challenges. The current demonstrator, the research investigated, and the direction of future research proposed are outlined.