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Abstract
Industrial engineering was conceptualized in 1900's as engineering practice to analyze costs and reduce unit product cost through increase in productivity of resources. Taylor and Gilbreth were the pioneers who developed productivity science/engineering, time study, motion study, process chart and operation analysis methods. In the current digitized work systems, recording the current practice of a process on the shop floor as events along with time taken is being done by manufacturing software. Therefore, IoT based edge computing and cloud computing assistance to work system analysis can be developed. Computer aided industrial engineering can reduce the time spent in recording activity and provide more time to devote to generating improvement alternatives.
Current Industry 4.0 information systems, comprising of ERP, MES, DCS, SCADA, PLCs and CNC Machine controllers provide full information on the planned process and also record the history of events. Process mining software is also available. Digital twins provide much more detailed view of the machines and their work. Digital engineering databases can be accessed to identify alternatives and simulations can be done in the digital twin by industrial engineers to test the relevant changes in processes. Computer aided industrial engineering uses the digitization of engineering processes to do continuous improvement of products and processes over the product and process life cycle with objectives of increasing productivity, safety, quality, and reducing time and cost. The new approaches to work analysis are elaborated by a review of the currently available digital data based process improvement methods and applications.
Keywords
Industrial Engineering 4.0; Industry 4.0; Computer aided process improvement; Work system productivity analysis; Digitization of work systems.
1.Introduction
In this age of industrial revolution 4.0, the role of computers has increased in the engineering systems in design, production and operation of engineering items, machines and systems. The intelligence of computers has increased due to developments in artificial intelligence or machine intelligence. Machine learning is one application of this development of artificial intelligence. Embedded computers increase the intelligence of various machines. Computer aided design, computer aided process planning, and computer aided manufacturing came into existence forty years ago. Computer aid to industrial engineering also came into existence. But it has not received adequate recognition and emphasis in industrial engineering discipline and did not evolve into "computer...