A System to Determine the Optimal Work-in-Progress Inventory Stored in Interoperation Manufacturing Buffers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article discusses an interesting topic to the academic community, however this article shows several shortcomings, for instance:

·      The text definitely needs proofreading.

·      I could find a long article, with 49 pages and only 22 references. Therefore, it is not surprising to find several sentences without the supporting theory.

·      I also took a closer look on the references. Most are outdated and came from conference proceedings, but also from Wikipedia, which in my opinion is not an acceptable academic practice.

·      The article structure is also confusing, it starts well, with an introduction, but then it continues with a section of “materials and methods”, which is a mix of a literature review and the methodology section.

·      I was lost with so many figures and tables. Note that the article has 27 figures and 20 tables, most of them are not even well explained.

Overall, the manuscript does not comply with the necessary standards for publication. Please do not be disappointed with my comments, as I know publishing is a very hard and demanding task. I would suggest to make a deep restructuration of the manuscript before submitting again.

Author Response

Dear Mr. / Mrs. Reviewer

 

Thank you very much for the inspiring comments on our article. We hope that the modified version of the article will satisfy all your expectations. In view of the necessity to incorporate the comments of other reviewers into the article, the following changes have been made to the article:

1. Abstract - was shortened.

2. Methods and material – the section has been shortened and add references.

3. Results – the chapter was divided into two parts due to an increase in transparency. The first part includes an algorithm with its description. The second contains a case study. The number of figure and tables has been reduced. To the figure of graphs has been add a more detailed description. References were also added.

4. Achievement result – unit added

5. Reference. References from the conferences were used in the article but as a source of information from which article is based. The reference from Wikipedia has been removed.

In view of the adjustments made, the list of literature was also modified.

Kind regards, collective of Author's

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors should answer to the following questions to clarify some points of the article: 

1)The abstract is very long and it does not present uniquely the problem: it should be of quick reading to evaluate soon the paper argument.

2)     At the same way, the section about developing of modelling and simulation is a bit long. 3)      In all the paper, the authors use the term “we…” in many points (lines 183, 220,223 and so on). I suggest to modify in impersonal form.

4)      Line 186: Base on reference [19]. The word "reference" is missing. 5)      The software used for modelling and simulation (Tecnomatix by Siemens) is a commercial one. Could the authors try to evidence better the innovation in their approach?

6)      Line 457: due to the fact that it is the main goal to obtain reliable results, how was the definition of targets and inputs carried out?

7)      Line 539-540: the sentence is not clear, maybe are missing some parts.

8)      Tables 19 and 20 are very useful for summarizing the paper findings, but the temporal unit is the year for all the three parameters of table 20? Please clarify.

Author Response

Dear Mr. / Mrs. Reviewer

 

Thank you very much for the inspiring comments on our article. We hope that the modified version of the article will satisfy all your expectations. In view of the necessity to incorporate the comments of other reviewers into the article, the following changes have been made to the article:

1. Abstract - was shortened. The article was modified so that "we" did not occur.

2. Methods and material – the section has been shortened and add references. In the context of the article, the use of Tecnomatix Plant Simulation software was not the main concern, it is used for verification and validation. We do not think that innovativeness lies in the software, but in the proposed system.

3. Results – the chapter was divided into two parts due to an increase in transparency. The first part includes an algorithm with its description. The second contains a case study. The number of figure and tables has been reduced. To the figure of graphs has been add a more detailed description. References were also added. For Line 457 was made a change by defining what the authors understood under these terms. The selection of the manufacturing line range depends on management and inputs collected data are defined in the algorithm.

4. Achievement result – unit added

In view of the adjustments made, the list of literature was also modified.

Kind regards, collective of Author's

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Critical remarks

The work presents a system based on the optimization of stocks on conveyors. It was assumed and allowed to shut down technological machines during production. This assumption is impossible on many machines and production lines . This is due to the fact that starting the machine requires going through the control procedure and stabilizing the process.
As a result of these operations, large delays would be generated with simultaneous production of defective products during stabilization after commissioning.

Suggestion from application engineer
From my experience with implementations, it results that much better results are obtained by reducing "temporarily" the efficiency of machines without switching them off.

The second general remark to simulation concerns the consideration of micro-downtime. Depending on the efficiency, these times generate one of the largest production losses. It would have to be included in the simulator.

While working in the tasks of production automation, we use the observation of production parameters based on data collected by machine controllers (PLC, CNC). We do not use approximate and wasted times and the efficiency of the machine. We use the actual parameters covering all disturbances on the production lines.
This approach makes it possible to present actual data on stocks and reasons for increasing the production stocks on conveyour machines set in the technological line.

Author Response

Dear Mr. / Mrs. Reviewer

 

Thank you very much for the inspiring comments on our article. We hope that the modified version of the article will satisfy all your expectations. In view of the necessity to incorporate the comments of other reviewers into the article, the following changes have been made to the article:

1. Abstract - was shortened.

2. Methods and material – the section has been shortened and add references.

3. Results – the chapter was divided into two parts due to an increase in transparency. The first part includes an algorithm with its description. The second contains a case study. The number of figure and tables has been reduced. To the figure of graphs has been add a more detailed description. References were also added.

4. Achievement result – unit added

In view of the adjustments made, the list of literature was also modified. As part of the research in this article, we have been engaged in determining optimal manufacturing buffer capacities. When considering the implementation of the system, we thought about the system you suggested. We incorporate your recommendations in further research and publications because they are valuable and directly refer to the practice.

 

Kind regards, collective of Author's

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to thank the authors for having revised the article, which have been considerably improved. Prior to publication, I would recommend proofreading. Congratulations for your article

Author Response

Dear editor,

 

thank you for your review report. As was suggested we use English proofreading services of MDPI.

 

Kind regards and thank you for your help.

 

Collectives of authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx