This book is intended to offer a solution to this problem by making production systems smart—i.e., capable of self-diagnosis and autonomous design of continuous improvement projects—leading to the desired and rigorously predicted productivity improvement.

To make any production system smart, it must be equipped with a “brain” capable of both diagnosing its “health” and calculating necessary steps for continuous improvement. Such a “brain” has been recently developed by Smart Production Systems LLC (U.S. Patent No. 11,861,739, Jan. 2, 2024) and is referred to as the Programmable Manufacturing Advisor (PMA). Programming and installing a PMA into any production system makes it smart.

The goals of this book are to introduce the reader to the main concepts and analytics of Smart Production Systems (SPS); provide working knowledge of SPS software; and, most importantly, enable the reader to utilize PMA-based SPS on the factory floor for operations management and for designing continuous improvement projects with analytically predicted results.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the only book on smart production systems available on the market today. Free on Kindle.