Characterisation of the Business Models for Innovative, Non-Mature Production Automation ...

344 Pages·2012·4.22 MB·English

by  Antonio Maffei

Characterisation of the Business Models for
Innovative, Non-Mature Production
Automation Technology

Antonio Maffei
Doctoral Thesis

School of Industrial Engineering and Management
Department of Production Engineering
The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
December 2012
TRITA-IIP-12-09
ISSN 1650-1888
ISBN 978-91-7501-588-0

Copyright © Antonio Maffei
Evolvable Production System Group
Department of Production Engineering
The Royal Institute of Technology
S-100 44 Stockholm

Tryck: Universitetsservice US AB
“You are never dedicated to
something you have complete
confidence in. No one is fanatically
shouting that the sun is going to rise
tomorrow. They know it's going to rise
tomorrow. When people are fanatically
dedicated to political or religious faiths
or any other kinds of dogmas or goals,
it's always because these dogmas or
goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into
Values.
Gustav Doré’s vision of the eighth Bolge

"O frati," dissi, "che per cento milia 'O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente, Perils,' I said, ' have come unto the West,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia To this so inconsiderable vigil

d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente Which is remaining of your senses still
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza, Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente. Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.

Considerate la vostra semenza: Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
fatti non foste a viver come bruti, Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza" But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Translation: H.W. Longfellow
Inferno Ch. XXVI vv. 112-120
Manufacturing companies are nowadays facing an
unprecedented series of challenges to their survival: global
competition and product mass-customization are the shaping forces
of tomorrow’s business success. The consequent need for agile and
sustainable production solutions is the utmost motivation behind
the development of innovative approaches which often are not in
line with the state of art. It is well documented that companies fail in
recognizing how such disruptively innovative approaches can yield
an interesting economic output. This, in turn, enhances the risk of
leaving the aforementioned promising technologies conceptually
and practically underdeveloped. In the field of automatic
production systems the Evolvable Production System paradigm
proposes modular architectures with distributed, autonomous
control rather than integral design and hierarchical, centralized
control. EPS technology is thus disruptive: it refuses the present
paradigm of Engineer to Order in industrial automation by
proposing an advanced Configure to Order system development
logic.
This dissertation investigates the possibility of using the recent
sophisticated developments of the concept of Business Model as a
holistic analytical tool for the characterization and solution of the
issue of bringing disruptive and non-fully mature innovation to
proficient application in production environments. In order to purse
this objective the main contributions in the relevant literature have
been extracted and combined to an original definition of business
model able to encompass the aspects deemed critical for the
problem. Such a construct is composed of three elements: (1) Value
Proposition that describe the features of a technology that generates
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value for a given customer, (2) the Value Configuration and the (3)
Architecture of the Revenue which describe the mechanisms that
allows to create and capture such value respectively.
The subsequent work has focused on the EPS paradigm as a
specific case of the overall problem. The first step has been a full
characterization of the related value proposition through an
innovative approach based on a bottom-up decomposition in its
elementary components, followed by their aggregation into
meaningful value offerings: with reference to the EPS paradigm
such an approach has disclosed an overall value proposition
composed of six potentially independent value offerings. This
collection of Value Offerings has then been used as a basis to
generate the EPS business models. In particular for each single
offering a possible set of necessary activities and resources has been
devised and organized in a coherent value configuration. The
resulting creation mechanisms have then been linked among each
other following a logical supplier-customer scheme for capturing the
value: this allowed establishing the architecture of revenue, last
element of the overall production paradigm. Finally the results have
been validated in a semi-industrial system developed for the
(IDEAS, 2010-2013) project through the individuation of the areas of
application of such business models.
Keywords: Evolvable Production Systems, Automatic Assembly
Systems, Business Models, Disruptive Innovation, Maturity of
Production Technology.

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I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor
Prof. Mauro Onori. He has the mental outlook and the multifaceted
knowledge of a genius. The huge structural help he has been
providing for this dissertation is just a minimal part of his overall
contribution to my personal growth during the past years. He
empowered me to missions beyond what I believed to be my
capabilities and he always took the first bullet. Sinceramente…
Grazie Mauro!
I owe true and earnest thankfulness to a large set of people
which have actively contributed to the conception of this work. My
co-supervisor Associate Prof. Daniel Semere has given a crucial
stimulus to my curiosity toward the object of my research and
followed it up with insightful discussions. My colleagues Dr. Luis
Ribeiro and Dr. Pedro Ferreira have been priceless steering forces
toward the achievement of such an endeavor.
I am obliged to many of my colleagues that supported me
throughout the years. My closest research associates and friends at
KTH, Tech. Lic. Pedro Neves, Tech. Lic. Hakan Akillioglu and João
Ferreira along with the international industrial and academic
partners of the EUPASS and IDEAS European collaborative projects
have largely contributed in shaping my thoughts and methods. A
particular mention goes to my friends at the department for
contributing to such a wonderful working environment: Andreas,
Lorenzo, Marcus, Anders, Mikael, Kerstin, Danfang, Victoria, Asif
and in general to all the teaching, administrative and support staff as
well, including all the young researchers and all the XPRES initiative
stakeholders.

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Thanks to all my family and in particular to my mother and
brother for being positive models and priceless references even
though we are most of the time geographically apart. For similar
reasons I like to thank all my friends in Italy, Sweden and all over
the world. My final and most deserved acknowledgment goes to my
fiancée Utkum whose unspoken support is literally beyond words.

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Author’s selected publications:
1. From Flexibility to Evolvability: ways to achieve Self-
Reconfigurability and Full-Autonomy, Maffei A., Dencker K.,
Bjelkemyr M., Onori M., 9th IFAC Symposium on Robot
Control, Syroco 2009, Gifu, Japan 9-12 September 2009.
2. A Preliminary Study of Business Model for Evolvable Production
System, Maffei A., Onori M. International Symposium on
Assembly and Manufacturing (IEEE ISAM 2009). Seoul,
Korea 17-20 November 2009
3. Evolvable Production System: Mechatronic Production Equipment
with Evolutionary Control, Maffei A., Onori M., Neves P.,
Barata J., Doctoral Conference on Computing Electrical and
Industrial Systems, DOCEIS 2010, Lisbon, Portugal, 22-24
February 2010
4. Evolvable Production Systems: Foundations for new Business
Models, Maffei A., Licentiate Thesis. School of Industrial
Engineering and Management - Department of Production
Engineering. The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
June 2010.
5. From Flexibility to true Evolvability: an introduction to the basic
requirements, Maffei A., Hofmann A., International
Symposium on Industrial Electronic, ISIE 2010, Bari, Italy, 4-7
July 2010
6. Evolvable Production System: a new business environment, Maffei
A. International Symposium on Assembly and
Manufacturing (IEEE/ISAM 2011) Tampere, Finland, 25-27
May 2011
7. Evolvable Production Systems: environment for new business
models, Maffei A., Onori M., Key Engineering Materials:
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Materials, Mechatronics and Automation, Volume 467, 1592-
1597
8. Handling Complexity in Evolvable Production System Bjelkemyr
M., Maffei A., International symposium on Industrial
Electronic, ISIE 2010, Bari, Italy, 4-7 July 2010
9. Evolvable Assembly Systems: Latest Developments, Onori M.,
Maffei A., Barata J., 8th International Conference on
Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware, Prague,
Czech Republic, 21-24 September 2008
10. Evolvable assembly systems: coping with variations through
evolution, Semere D, Onori M., Maffei A., Adamietz R.,
Assembly Automation Volume 28, Number 2, 2008

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