Toward decentralized intelligence in manufacturing: recent trends in automatic identification of things

• DOI: 10.1007/s00170-016-8628-y
• Publication Date: 2016-03-31T05:09:17Z
• Authors: Mika Liukkonen; Tsung-Nan Tsai
• Keywords: Barcode; Identification; Information Sharing

Development of decentralized solutions for managing individual products in manufacturing and postmanufacturing applications makes it possible to embed automation in the product flow, which is more efficient compared to the conventional approach based on automating individual unit processes. The decentralized approach can be enabled using manufacturing objects that are capable of negotiating with their environment, observing it, making decisions according to these observations, and sharing information on their status and needs. For these purposes, automatic identification (auto-ID) technology is required. Automatic identification involves techniques for automatically identifying things by using tokens with individual codes, collecting information on them, and transferring that information automatically into computer systems. In general, not only techniques such as barcode, optical character recognition (OCR), and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are associated with auto-ID but also other techniques that are less used in manufacturing can be highlighted. The present study seeks to map the existing techniques for automatic identification of objects and to determine their most potential targets of use in manufacturing.