Address business crisis caused by COVID-19 with collaborative intelligent manufacturing technologies

While COVID-19 has affected the daily life of almost everyone around the world, it has also caused major disturbances to the global economy and to the operations of many businesses in the manufacturing industry. Reginal lockdowns resulted in supply chain breakages. Workforce shortages caused difficult shop floor operations. This study tries to discuss how collaborative intelligent manufacturing technologies can help to address these challenges through (i) optimal design of resilient collaborative supplier networks; (ii) collaborative planning of manufacturing operations among geographically distributed manufacturing plants; (iii) functional redundancy and dynamic reconfiguration of different shop floors; (iv) dynamic intelligent rescheduling of workforces for factory/shop floor operations; (v) remote testing and maintenance of manufacturing equipment with the support of digital twins technologies. These approaches are expected to be an effective hedge against the impact of COVID-19 or other natural disasters.