Manufacturing intelligence and innovation for digital manufacturing and operational excellence

Global manufacturing networks and supply chains are facing ongoing dynamic changes in the evolutionary business ecosystems. The introduction of new process technologies and the advances in manufacturing intelligence capabilities are having profound effects on the strategies, decisions, management, and operations involved in manufacturing (Chien et al. 2007; Leachman et al. 2007). While big data is accumulated due to the fully automation manufacturing facilities and logistics systems for business integration, various solutions and techniques are developed to extract useful information and derive effective intelligence to address new challenges such as cycle time reduction (Kuo et al. 2011; Chien et al. 2011), defect diagnosis (Hsu and Chien 2007; Liu and Chien 2013), demand forecast (Chien et al. 2010), equipment management (Chien et al. 2008; Hsu et al. 2012; Chien et al. 2013a), human capital (Chen and Chien 2011), and bio informatics (Lin and Chien 2009). In particular, manufacturing innovation and manufacturing intelligence technologies are developed to empower manufacturing excellence via soft computing, decision technologies, and evolutionary