Process and Operations Control in Modern Manufacturing

Dramatic advancements and adoption of computing capabilities, communication technologies, and advanced, pervasive sensing have impacted every aspect of modern manufacturing. Furthermore, as society explores the 4^th Industrial Revolution characterized by access to and leveraging of knowledge in the manufacturing enterprise, the very character of manufacturing is rapidly evolving, with new, more complex processes and radically new products appearing in both the industries and academe. As for traditional manufacturing processes, they are also undergoing transformations in the sense that they face ever-increasing requirements in terms of quality, reliability and productivity, needs that are being addressed in the knowledge domain. Finally, across all manufacturing we see the need to understand and control interactions between various stages of any given process, as well as interactions between multiple products produced in a manufacturing system. All these factors have motivated tremendous advancements in methodologies and applications of control theory in all aspects of manufacturing: at process and equipment level, manufacturing systems level and operations level. Motivated by these factors, the purpose of this paper is to give a high-level overview of latest progress in process and operations control in modern manufacturing. Such a review of relevant work at various scales of manufacturing is aimed not only to offer interested readers information about state-of-the art in control methods and applications in manufacturing, but also to give researchers and practitioners a vision about where the direction of future research may be, especially in light of opportunities that lay as one concurrently looks at the process, system and operation levels of manufacturing.