Abstract:

Industry 4.0 requires a complex integration of manufacturing, information, and communication technologies to enable real-time sharing of information across the value chain. Teaching students how to integrate these technologies without giving them insight of how everything comes together is a challenge. Consequently, many academic institutions have developed facilities that simulate the manufacturing environment, called learning factories, to support the teaching of Industry 4.0 technologies. Establishing a learning factory is expensive, thus these facilities must be designed carefully to ensure that they are cost effective. In this paper we present our path to implementing a cost-effective learning factory in the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology (W. Booth SEPT), Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University.

The facility meets its design objectives of:
(1) providing demonstrations of Industry 4.0 based manufacturing of real products to give students an insight into the full cycle of Industry 4.0 automated information flow from product design to supply chain management;
(2) supporting regular practical work for several courses;
(3) providing opportunities for product prototyping to research students;
(4) supporting collaborations between W. Booth SEPT on one hand, and industry and the general community of the other
.
The W. Booth SEPT Learning Factory has a wide range of smart and advanced manufacturing equipment. It is supported by a materials handling system and a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for integrating the production floor with the value chain. Our flexible manufacturing workstations are designed for electronics and mechanical assembly, as well as product marking and testing. We have tooled them to produce walking canes as our manufacturing demonstration product. This product has a low CO2 footprint. We intend to donate some of our products deserving members of our community or sell them at cost-recovery price; thus, the walking cane is a fit for this business model.

The learning factory gives students an insight into the implementation of Industry 4.0 manufacturing facility, and into the management an Industry 4.0 enabled facility through the production of our demonstration product. The learning factory is integrated with a teaching laboratory to create teaching and learning opportunities such as offering practical work in production floor and MES integration, MES configuration, as well as machine condition data collection and analysis.

Currently, the learning factory supports two Master of Applied Sciences (M.A.Sc) projects. One project focuses on developing low-cost MES to support the implementation of Industry 4.0 manufacturing paradigm in small and medium scale Enterprises (SME). The other project is on the development of collaborative robots (Cobots). The projects benefit from the expertise in the learning factory and will use our facilities to test the effectiveness of their products.

W. Booth SEPT Learning Factory supports university-industry/community collaboration. For example, Rockwell Automation uses the factory to demonstrate to potential customers some of their products. We hope to expand these collaborations as we develop our business model; especially for products such as the walking canes that are designed to keep seniors leaving independently longer.

Keywords:

Learning factory, experiential learning, Industry 4.0, technology.