Manufacturing Systems Operations and Engineering

Although the issues of design, organization, and management of industrial systems have been known in the literature for many years, the beginning of the 21st century, as a consequence of market changes and unprecedented technological development, initiated a change in the paradigms of organization and the need to use innovative tools for improving and optimizing production processes [1,2,3]. A significant breakthrough in this respect was the year 2011, when the assumptions of Industry 4.0 were presented for the first time at the Hanover fair, considered to be another breakthrough in the development of methods, techniques, and challenges related to the design of production systems and processes [4]. An important element influencing the shaping of the directions of research work was also the publication by the European Commission in 2021 of a document entitled “Industry 5.0. Towards a sustainable, human-centric and resilient European industry”, which was intended to indicate future directions of development in the field of industry and was a kind of correction to the assumptions of the concept, increasing the importance of humans as a basic element of the functioning of every production system [5].

The above-mentioned changes focused on the issue of the personalization of production, as well as the growing pressure to reduce manufacturing costs (which is, among others, a consequence of globalization in both trade and production), imposing a change in the search for new forms of manufacturing systems that will enable highly flexible production at a simultaneous low level of manufacturing costs [6,7]. As a result, concepts of new types of manufacturing systems began to appear in the literature, including intelligent manufacturing systems [8], smart manufacturing systems [9], reconfigurable manufacturing systems [10], dedicated flexible manufacturing systems [11], resilient manufacturing systems [12], and others. Although research on the development of the above forms of manufacturing systems has been ongoing for a dozen or so years, there is still no single dominant solution that would enable the implementation of personalized production carried out with high efficiency and at low manufacturing costs [13]. Therefore, many researchers are still intensively searching for both the right forms of manufacturing systems, as well as methods of organizing and managing production processes in these systems [14].

In the context of the development of production systems, the rapid development in the areas of automation, digitalization, and the robotization of production is also significant [15]. Available technologies enable modern production systems to be equipped with modern machine tools and industrial robots, as well as automatic transport devices enabling flexible and highly efficient production with the limited use of human resources [16,17]. An important element that has a direct impact on the design of modern production systems are programs for the simulation of production processes, as well as virtual reality technologies, which enable verification of the adopted design assumptions without the need to build a physical model of the designed production system (which would be associated with huge costs and extend the design time of such a system) [18,19].

When discussing the issues of designing and organizing production systems, an important element is also the issue of the importance of humans in the implementation of production systems [20]. As history shows (including the concept of flexible production systems from the 1980s), the implementation of fully automated processes is only possible in selected industries, and it is not possible to replace humans in the implementation of production processes [21]. A particular challenge in this respect is the issue of cooperation between robots and humans, which poses challenges of both a social, technical, ethical, and legal nature [22,23]. Moreover, in the stage of designing modern production systems, the key element is not only the issue of the efficiency of the implemented production processes, but also their positive impact on the environment—both in terms of the amount of energy consumption and the generation of waste and post-production waste [24,25,26].

This Special Issue presents current research in different areas connected with manufacturing systems and engineering. In particular, the papers published in this volume cover the following topics:

• Comparing modern manufacturing tools and their effect on zero-defect manufacturing strategies;
• Virtual validation workflow design framework;
• Application of simulation methods in the optimization of the blood plasma storage process;
• Qualification of additively manufactured components for application in the oil and gas industry;
• Effectiveness of work teams during the implementation of continuous improvement tools in the manufacturing industry.

All of the published works present current research results and present the latest development trends in the design and engineering of manufacturing systems. Although they cover only selected issues related to the problem of reducing production defects, the use of additive technologies in industry, and increasing the efficiency of storage processes and group work, they constitute a significant contribution to the development of production engineering and can provide a basis for further research, leading to the improvement in modern production systems and processes.