Patent ID: 11861739
Assignee: THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Field: IT methods for management (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  Y | IPC G

Claim 13:
14. A method of determining a productivity improvement action to achieve a desired productivity improvement for a manufacturing process, the method comprising:
electronically receiving measurements for a plurality of parameters indicating a productivity of each operation of a plurality of operations in the manufacturing process, the manufacturing process including multiple machines and buffers, each of the plurality of operations corresponding to operation of at least one of the multiple machines and buffers, and the measurements received via multiple sensors each configured to measure operation parameters of at least one of the multiple machines and buffers in real-time;
determining a baseline value of a performance metric indicating the productivity of the manufacturing process using the measurements of the plurality of parameters;
determining a recommended improvement action using one or more artificial intelligence (AI) optimization algorithms by:
(a) identifying a bottleneck in the plurality of operations;
(b) for one operation of the plurality of operations corresponding to the bottleneck, identifying a parameter from the plurality of parameters that improves the performance metric;
(c) adjusting a value of the identified parameter by a first step size;
(d) predicting the value of the performance metric using the adjusted value of the identified parameter; and
(e) repeating steps (a)-(d) until the predicted value of the performance metric or a difference between the predicted and baseline values of the performance metric reaches a predetermined performance metric threshold; and
(f) determining the recommended improvement action based on the adjusted value of identified parameter that causes the predicted value of the performance metric or the difference between the predicted and baseline values of the performance metric to reach the predetermined performance metric threshold; and

according to the recommended improvement action, perform at least one of reducing a cycle time of at least one of the multiple machines to increase a jobs per hour throughput of the machine, increasing a raw materials release rate of at least one of the multiple machines, or increasing a buffer capacity of at least one of the multiple buffers.