A Survey on Graph-based Systems in Manufacturing Processes

In the last decade manufacturing systems and their processes became more complex due to more individuality of products. Manufacturers want to give more freedom to the customer which is in contrast to mass production, where products are often very similar to each other. Manufacturing systems and their surroundings often consist of many data types and sources which are in no relation to each other. Due to this, optimisation and data, as well as process analysis, is often a hard task. The data may be stored in a graph-based system to set the data into relation, which enables to identify relations and dependencies. In other fields, like social networks or navigation graph-based systems are used to handle the increasing complexity. In this paper, we are giving an overview of algorithms and discuss methods for graph-based systems from different fields. After that, we review how these methods and algorithms may be applied to manufacturing processes and systems. The presented methods are mostly state of the art in their specific field and should be evaluated on assembly lines and their corresponding systems since the complexity they manage is often the same or higher than in manufacturing systems.