Data-Driven Analysis for RFID-Enabled Smart Factory: A Case Study

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and new manufacturing paradigms have brought greater complexity of massive datasets. Radio frequency identification (RFID), as one of the key IoT technologies, has been used to collect real-time production data to support the manufacturing decision-making in smart factories. The adoption of these technologies results in a large amount of data collection. To extract useful information from this data, this paper utilizes a big data approach to figure out useful insights from RFID-enabled data regarding possible bottlenecks or inefficiencies on the shop floor so as to improve the quality management. Time and quality are the main metrics measured in this paper, where the longest process times, part accuracy percentage, and failure rate are determined for each of the workers (UserIDs) and process types (ProcCodes). Key findings and observations are significant to make advanced decisions in the smart factory by making full use of the RFID captured data. Note to Practitioners- This paper was motivated by a real-life company which has used RFID technology for over ten years. Great myriad of data has been captured from frontline production shop floors where machines, workers, materials, and manufacturing jobs were logically associated. Processing time and quality data are studied in this paper so as to investigate the production performance in the RFID-enabled smart factory.