Glove Manufacturing: Opportunities and Challenges in Control Engineering

The glove manufacturing industry has seen tremendous growth recently, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. A long-standing shortage of supply of disposable medical gloves has highlighted an urgent need to increase production capacity. This requires glove manufacturers to be quick in adopting best practices, in line with Industry 4.0, in order to optimize various aspects of the industry. Unfortunately, information available in the existing literature is, however, limited due to the confidential nature of the majority of research in this area. This article discusses some opportunities and challenges related to this important chemical industry, from the perspective of control engineering. These insights can point to some interesting directions of future work.