**Description**
The growth of any country - and hence its economy - depends heavily on the country’s ability to develop its industrial sector. The aerospace sector is improving its productivity and growth by expanding its capacity for production by investing in new advanced tools and more equipment to provide additional capacity and flexibility in the face of widespread supply disruptions and unpredictable demand. However, the cost of such measures are high and can result in increased unit costs for the consumer. Alternatively, productivity and quality can be improved by utilizing available resources better to reach optimal performance and react to emerging disruptions and changes. Elastic Manufacturing is a new paradigm that aims to change the response behavior of aerospace firms to meet sudden market demands based on automated analysis of the utilization of the available resources, and autonomous allocation of capacity to use resources in the most efficient manner. Through digitalization and automation of the shopfloor (often called “Industry 4.0”), gathering real-time streaming data from equipment to monitor process performance boosts the efficiency on the production floor with no further costs. The impact of supply chain disruptions - and the resulting shortages of key materials - can be reduced through demand forecasting, inventory optimization, early warning systems, and flexible reallocation of resources; all of which could be managed elastically through integrated data collection in the supply chain. This paper describes how smart factories with more flexibility and resilience can be achieved with semantically-enhanced quality analytics, maintenance solutions, and automated key performance indicator monitoring. This paper also measures the capacity utilization rate, by following the measurement of multiple KPIs from a shopfloor level using data from a real aerospace project, and discusses with the aid of analytic visualizations the significance of monitored process performance.

**Author(s) - ranked in descending order of contribution / as it should appear when published**
Basem Elshafei
Jack Chaplin
Giovanna Martinez Arellano



Elastic manufacturing systems using smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 for capacity utilization measurements – a case study.  

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