Increasing attention to the environment and resource sustainability has extended the traditional forward supply chain (SC) into closed-loop supply chain (CLSC). Meanwhile, with the fast development and application of ICTs, especially like wireless technology, product related information embedded in different phases of the SC is strongly supposed to be obtained and integrated so as to realize the closed-loop product information (CLPI) tracking and feedback (TAF). Based on an EU project, models of three levels of abstraction for the CLPI TAF using wireless technology are proposed to elucidate and decompose the whole scenario, which acts as a systematic approach to meet the requirements in this area.

The whole product life cycle consists of three phases: beginning of life (BOL), middle of life (MOL), and end of life (EOL). Although large amounts of product life-cycle data are generated over the whole product life cycle, data flows are rather vague after BOL. Over the last decade, however, emerging Internet, wireless mobile telecommunications, and product identification technologies have created the potential of making the whole product life cycle visible. As a result, the scope of data to be managed has expanded over the whole product life cycle. Hence, it becomes important to describe product life-cycle metadata in a systematic manner. Although much attention has been paid to data modeling over several objects such as products and processes, modeling methodology for product life-cycle metadata is not well developed. To cope with this limitation, we develop a modeling method for product life-cycle metadata by using the resource description framework (RDF). We define an RDF data model and its schema for describing and managing product life-cycle metadata. In addition, we describe how the proposed RDF model can be usefully applied to track, trace, and infer product life-cycle data with an RDF query language.

This paper considers a tool provisioning problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) with an automatic tool transporter. The problem considered here is that of determining the number of copies of each tool type for a limited budget with the objective of minimizing makespan. This problem should be solved to decide the (additional) purchase of required tools when the FMS should be reconfigured due to change of part mix. To solve the problem, two heuristic algorithms are proposed. One is a composite search algorithm based on two greedy search methods, and the other is a search algorithm in which numbers of tool copies are determined based on tool groupings. In both algorithms, simulation results are used to find search directions. Computational experiments show that the latter search algorithm gives better results.