Tay, J. W. E., Roopun, V., Prasath, S. M., & Tan, P. S. (2025). Micro-Factory in the City: Enabling Distributed Manufacturing and Last-Mile Product Customisation in a Model Factory Value Chain. In Advancing Learning Factories: Enabling Future-Ready Skills (pp. 42–49). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98883-7_6
Abstract:
As manufacturing companies strive to be more sustainable and resilient in their operations towards Industry 5.0, they face challenges in responding flexibly to dynamic demand, especially for urban customer-centric produc-tion where demand spikes, noise and emissions constraints, and last-mile lo-gistics considerations limit their ability to make optimal decisions in coordi-nation with value chain partners. A Learning Factory can play an important role not just to upskill industry to use technologies that can address these challenges, but also to serve as a testbed and even support co-innovation and small-scale production for companies to explore new value chain manufac-turing paradigms. In this paper, we present such an example of the expan-sion of the SIMTech value chain to incorporate a new Micro-Factory located in another site closer to the city centre. The Micro-Factory leverages smart manufacturing platform capabilities to improve the demonstrative impact of the SIMTech ecosystem as a Learning Factory for training and outreach to industry, doing this by enabling multi-site manufacturing with a responsive cross-factory production system that leverages the high connectivity and availability of the SIMTech digital ecosystem for rapid deployment of high-mix low-volume last-mile product customisation capabilities. The Micro-Factory also supports accessible first-mile product collection for end-of-life products, a key step in enabling closed-loop manufacturing towards sustain-able manufacturing in the SIMTech value chain.
License type:
Publisher Copyright
Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research - Singapore RIE2025 Manufacturing, Trade and Connectivity (MTC) Industry Alignment Fund-Pre-Positioning - Distributed Smart Value Chain
Grant Reference no. : M23L4a0001
Description:
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98883-7_6.