Enabling Manufacturing Competitiveness and Economic Sustainability

Products variety and complexity and value generation for individual customers as well as the whole society are discussed. Dynamic changes in the world economy and their impact on sustainable manufacturing competitiveness are analysed. An overview of products variety, its sources and drivers and its effect on products design, planning of manufacturing is presented. The effect of variety on complexity of products and systems is highlighted as well as strategies for managing and profiting from it. Variety to enhancing customers’ value and the relation between product space and economic complexity are discussed. A multi-facetted strategy for sustainable competitive manufacturing is presented.

Cycle management as a potential new paradigm in manufacturing planning contributes to the management of the entire innovation processes improving its efficiency and flexibility. Building on existing ideas about single cycles and established manufacturing planning approaches, a generic cycle model and a cycle information sheet as uniform modeling framework for mapping, analyzing and managing cycles are proposed. In addition, ideas for continuous manufacturing planning and the application of cycle management are outlined based on first results from an extensive literature review on manufacturing planning. Going forward, the full literature review will serve as input for the development of a detailed approach for a cycle-oriented continuous manufacturing planning fostering the establishment of cycle management in manufacturing planning.

Already today cities are the biggest entities of industrial and economic activity and the growth of urban populations is steadily increasing. By 2030 the number of people living in cities will rise to five billion, facing great challenges to infra- structure, economic development and life-quality induced by scarce resources, climate change and the mere number of people. Addressing the city of tomorrow and its markets therefore requires a new way of thinking for almost every industry sector. Conventional single-consumer-related products have to be replaced by integrated approaches forming whole urban systems: A new relationship of information, resources, products and users will lie at the heart of the innovation loop that cities will have to master within the next decades. Within the convergence of urban systems representing the Morgenstadt, also the production sector plays an important role and will be a crucial factor to reach a sustainable living and working environment in urban systems. This paper discusses the main challenges for our cities in the next decades and introduces five hypotheses for urban production in the Morgenstadt.

In the paper tools and methods for customer oriented development of mutable production systems are presented. An easy to use benchmark, taking into account the complete life cycle, enables system manufacturers to assess their approach regarding own expenses as well as from a customer’s perspective, making one able to legitimate specific measures and according costs during the acquisition phase. Furthermore, a tool using the commonly known structure of the House of Quality enables the customer to evaluate various technical options provided by the manufacturer. By means of prioritizing requirements for the mutable system as well as including interdependencies between eligible options, a best suiting configuration of variants can be determined. The paper therewith especially focuses on methods and tools to help manufacturers of complex production systems to introduce mutability in a reasonable extent.

This paper reviews the state of the art in reconfiguration of distributed production systems and develops an integrated model for the design, planning and operation of changeable production systems in distributed manufacturing. For the model development, a heuristic research method was applied involving a selected group of experienced experts. To test the practical relevance of the model, it was successfully applied for the design of a geographically distributed manufacturing network based on scalable and modular manufacturing units.

In recent years the principles of industrialisation and prefabrication of factory-finished elements have gained more and more acceptance in the construction sector. Due to the limited duration of projects in this sector, manufacturing cells and assembly line configurations show a very short life time and they have to be highly flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. This paper gives an overview about the state of the art in prefabrication and reconfigurability in the building industry. Based on the experiences from an industrial case study the paper shows the first research results of an approach to increase a company’s ability for smart reconfiguration of pre-assembly.

The potential of modular micro-assembly systems can often not be fully exploited by small companies, as commercial availability of process modules is limited and the development and maintenance of a pool of process modules is too elaborate. To overcome this problem, an open process module interface specification is proposed, which allows integration of process modules into different systems (cross-platform integration). Based on the specification, a process module construction kit is presented, which shall reduce the development effort of process modules. Both concepts are a prerequisite for an independent platform for modular process equipment. A net present value analysis and a SWOT-analysis are performed to evaluate the concept system against special purpose machinery. The results show that a modular system reduces investment risks whilst improving the ability to follow the market dynamics.

Manufacturing and handling of micro parts is a great challenge due to their small dimensions. Manufacturing processes and the state of knowledge in macro technologies are not smoothly transferable to the micro world. This can be justified, for example, by size effects and the related, changed component behaviour. It is assumed that known statistical distributions from macro range are changed, too, concerning to the changed behaviour and changed physical regularities in micro range. For that reason quality criteria for micro cups are described. By means of these selected criteria, parts are judged. Using the findings, statistical distribution models for the simulation of ladder linked parts production are determined.

The design and production of mechatronic systems is an interdisciplinary and complex task. Within the integrative development process the interactions between the design of product and associated production system have to be considered continuously. The selection of appropriate manufacturing resources requires knowledge about operations, work piece characteristics and machine capabilities. Therefore, a consistent description of manufacturing resources and operations is presented that supports the conceptual design of production systems. Sets of attributes and parameters include all necessary information to match a resource with operation specific requirements as well as general requirements.

The manufacturing industry needs flexibility and changeability to accommodate the increasing market dynamics and the related need for product change, variety, and customisation. Achieving such manufacturing responsiveness is the focus of Modular Manufacturing Systems (MMS). MMS have become central in research, but yet are short numbered in industry. This paper presents a case report on MMS platform development at a large Danish manufacturing company. The approach taken is based on related theory of modular product development and hence, modular architectures. The platform is developed following a six-step method and the paper provides thorough descriptions and illustrative examples of each step.

Mass customization and the evolution of products provide significant challenges to manufacturing system designers. Paradigms such as changeability, product process co-evolution and product platform development have been developed over the years to tackle these challenges. This research work identifies the synthesis decision-making activity in manufacturing system design to be a critical aspect of the development cycle, since many factors have to be taken into consideration. These include technical factors such as machine capability, but also uncertainty due to changing business and product elements. This research therefore aims to provide manufacturing system designers with an insight of the consequences of synthesis decisions on the range of products that can be manufactured by the evolving manufacturing system by contributing a manufacturing capability measure based on product range capability.

Simulation models of transport systems must have reality-compliant electric inputs and outputs to test original controllers in the context of emulation and virtual commissioning. Usually, these models are hard to verify. We present a new control concept for the fast verification of such models. All components of the model are automatically connected to a virtual controller. A one-time created and manufacturer-specific PLC program is used to drive the model and even reconfigurations of it. Engineers can visually verify the functioning of the model before emulation itself starts. The concept has been implemented and used successfully in several applications.

State of the art in producing 3-dimensional formed plastic shields is the use of mould blocks that are milled on machining centers. This paper describes the replacement of traditional mould blocks through a novel automated reusable mould and tooling system, providing good forming results and low investment costs. The reconfigurable tooling system replaces commonly used mould blocks. Two major issues will be adressed. The first target is to find principles for low tooling costs, while the second target focuses on the improvement of the forming process suitable for the system. Therefore the system will be applicable for a broad range of products.

Multi-site manufacturing system of systems (SoS) are complex systems of geographically dispersed manufacturing organisations that self-organise in response to customers’ needs, dissolving once these needs have been satisfied. This paper presents results from the EU FP7 project, Road2SoS, which has developed a roadmap of multi-site manufacturing SoS in order to explore the potential pathways to a future vision of a globally reconfigurable manufacturing SoS. The most important drivers, benefits, and challenges for the implementation of this vision are described, and the implications of these results for different manufacturing business models are explored.

The ability to enable a quick modification and system-change is one of the essential requirements of future production systems. The two basic steps to adapt an automated production system to a new task are the reconfiguration and the reprogramming. Against this background, the central objective of this paper is the discussion of a concept to simplify the programming. Assuming the use of standard industry devices, there is a lack in the ability to gather the necessary information about the available equipment automatically. Each device allocates its inherent skills through different functions, commands and interfaces. A classification and a method to map the devices’ skills to the program of automation systems have been developed to handle and interpret these skills. The concept and its application are described in this paper.

Transient and dynamic analysis of manufacturing systems is becoming important especially during ramp-up periods and for systems with frequent changeovers. In this paper, the transient and dynamic behavior of a simple re-entrant manufacturing system is studied. The behavior of the system is analyzed for six different cases with different relationships between the operations’ processing times. The parameters included in the study are the operations’ processing times and the number of pallets in the system. The analysis identifies cases where complex behavior takes place as well as the parameter values controlling that behavior.

The global competition in today’s manufacturing industry is forcing enterprises to continuously strive for higher operational efficiency and responsiveness to customer demands in an expeditious manner. The press tool industry is facing challenges ranging from inflexible manufacturing systems to ageing technology. Furthermore, having inflexible manufacturing systems and ageing technology allow industries to struggle to compete globally and locally, which leads some of industry retrenching employees and liquidation. South African Press tool industries have a role to play in addressing social challenges such as high unemployment and how to develop ways to create more jobs. For purposes of this study, the reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) principles with the emphasis on reconfigurability are applied in the press tool industry to revamp manufacturing responsiveness towards customer demands. A structured questionnaire, administered by mail was used to collect primary data for the study. The data was analyzed using the Microsoft Excel package. The results of this research indicate that high priority areas that need attention were manufacturing system and business functions that are failing to meet various customer needs and demands. A proposed model has been created to address the high priority areas. Further studies will focus on the RMS performance evaluation within South African Press tool industry.

Due to international competition and frequently changing customer demands, manufacturers production requirements become more complex. Production breakdowns demand for efficient fault solutions. Commonly, this problem is often tried to be tackled by the design of the production systems architecture. An alternative way is the consideration of the system behaviour. The paper proposes an approach based on a behaviour pattern concept for identifying alternate fault and reconfiguration solutions. Further, this work deals with typically applied approaches and strategies for breakdown solution and illustrates appraisements for a use case due to hybrid simulation.

Virtual assembly and disassembly (VA&D) usage enables knowledge exchange between design department and assembly production and aftermarket in the product development (PD) process. Utilisation of VA&D tools must be connected to the PD process in robust methods to fully employ this potential. A case study was performed at a manufacturing company to identify virtual activities and their position in the PD process. Assembly production and aftermarket departments have common demands on the utilisation of the VA&D tools in the PD process. Milestones that demands VA&D simulations shall be included in both concept phase and development phase in the PD process.

In order to facilitate the improvement in product quality and production efficiency, many companies use simulation applications. In turn, they face the challenge of making these applications interoperable. Once the interoperability is established, the challenges of understanding and improving the processes arise. They can be overcome by modeling and analyzing the processes in question. This paper presents a use case scenario from laser cutting. A new concept is introduced addressing the challenges aforementioned. It conforms to the principles of the integration and examination of data and combines virtual production with the goal of gaining knowledge through the analysis of simulated processes.

Training of the staff is a time consuming task. Today a lot of explanations are done at the built machine. Using Virtual Reality (VR) the staff could be trained at a virtual model. Presenting additional information like texts or diagrams besides the virtual model is essential for education purposes, but a time consuming process feasible only by experts. We are addressing this issue by presenting a concept to create Immersive Presentations and an App suite that enables the trainers to create VR based education scenarios augmented with additional information in an easy and comprehensible way on their own.

In concurrent engineering, uncertainty in process planning arises because product design remains unfinished. Common solutions involve staying vague or creating concrete but speculative plans. In this work, a vagueness measure for process descriptions is proposed. The proposed method employs a controlled natural language for process descriptions. The measure is applied to an automotive end assembly project. Results show that the vagueness measure in initial planning is correlated with the number of changes in both work task attributes and work task descriptions. Future applications could address optimisation of planning detail throughout concurrent process planning.

Corporations are adopting different strategies and enablers to cope with changing market demands and customers’ requirements. Customer demands are often unpredictable. Different product demand in different periods increases the need to integrate product platform design with product inventory models. A Multi-Period Changeable Modular Product Assembly model is introduced to design optimal product platforms by determining the best product family formation and modular product platform composition. The new model customizes product platforms by either assembly and/or disassembly, to produce different products and families. The optimal product platforms are defined based on product demand in each investigated period. The developed model incorporates the cost of assembly/disassembly in forming product platforms and families. A four product family of modular products is used to illustrate the application and advantages of the proposed multi-period changeable product platform design model. Results show the ability of the model to identify optimal sub-product families from the initial large family. Different inventory, mass assembly, and customization assembly and disassembly costs have been optimized in reasonable computing time.

The sheet metal forming industry is one of the most important suppliers in the automotive sector. However, the industry sector is struggling with a steadily increasing number of different parts, coupled with decreasing batch numbers. As a result, new flexible tool concepts must be developed. However, because of the high cost and consequently high risk of development of such tools, manufacturers have been careful. This paper presents a new design process based on hardware-in-the-loop simulation. This new process allows development of mechanical and controller design in parallel. In addition, programming of the controller can be tested against the mechanical design of the tool, before the machine is built. The method was applied to a new tool and proved to be effective in reducing development risks and optimizing the process sequence.

The insight that manufacturing companies nowadays have to compete in an increasingly dynamic and differentiated market environment with increased competition is not new. Nevertheless, it is still difficult for many companies, particularly in high wage countries, to cope with the dilemma of simultaneously increasing cost pressure and differentiation. The following paper introduces a model to address this challenge. The model attempts to give support in finding the right fit between the production system set up and the product portfolio offered to the market. The core element is a navigator for an integrative assessment and configuration of product production systems in the domains “Customer Value Management”, “Product Architecture and Technology Design”, “Integrated Product and Production Design” and “Production Process Design”.

The increasing complexity of products creates new challenges in production planning. Hence, the methodology of process development has to be designed valuable. An innovative approach to reach efficient planning consists in the virtualization of planning processes. The concept of the ”Digital Factory” enables a preliminary evaluation of the planning success. In the present work, a framework is presented, which allows for the integration of dedicated applications into an integrative data model to gain a holistic mapping of the production. Using Intelligence approaches, data can be analyzed to provide decision support and optimization potentials. The advantages involved are demonstrated by a production structure planning approach in connection with a process chain optimization.

Nowadays, a robotic excavator is widely applied in several fields of mining industry, agriculture, and forestry. Due to the complexity of dig environment such as slope of terrain profile, hardness of soil and unknown disturbances inside the soil, a versatile dig strategy avoiding obstacles has become a challenge to be addressed. This article presents an engineering model that describes the mechanical behavior of the robot excavators when it interacts with soil and generates an appropriate bucket path to adapt with each soil type, terrain profile and avoids buried obstacles as well. Based on a concept of the digging process, a robot excavator was designed in SOLIDWORKS and then exported to ADAMS environment. Whereas a soil model was modeled and analyzed by finite-element analysis (FEA) in ANSYS, then exported to ADAMS environment. The interactive simulation was implemented in ADAMS environment to investigate the dynamic behavior of robot and soil. Through the self-optimizing behavior of the robot in the digging process, an optimal bucket trajectory and an intelligent control strategy were generated in MATLAB/Simulink to control the robot tracking the desired bucket trajectory. The self-optimizing strategy was evaluated by effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in testing scenarios with many soil types and obstacles on the virtual prototype model.

Mass customisation involves three fundamental capabilities: Robust Process Design, Choice Navigation and Solution Space Development. A Survey has indicated that a number of companies have ceased mass customizing less than one year after initiating the effort. One reason for this is poor knowledge about the mass customisation progress and guidance of continuous improvement. This paper will conceptualize a framework for measurement and assessment of a company’s mass customisation performance, utilizing metrics within the three fundamental capabilities. By assessing performance companies can identify within which areas improvement would increase competitiveness the most and ultimately enabling more efficient transition to mass customisation.

Decision-making models for manufacturing technologies are becoming increasingly complex due to on-going rapid developments in additive and subtractive (Addtractive) manufacturing. Decision-making in manufacturing technologies should be based on machine and resource capabilities. Currently, multi-process manufacturing models have many shortcomings when describing machining capabilities, and in some cases, modelling approaches used in decision-making are ambiguous and poorly constrained. In this research, a formal modelling approach is proposed to facilitate modelling of machining capability and associated Addtractive operations. This mathematically based formal method allows system properties to be described in a well-defined manner. The ISO-standardised Z notation (named after Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory) has been utilised to build a state-oriented formalism model for machining capabilities and associated operations.

The commercial vehicle industry is characterized by a dynamic market environment, which implicates changes in the product portfolio as well as fluctuating quantities of demand. Depending on the model-mix, these cause diverse assembly tasks. In addition, changing production quantities cause an adjustment of cycle time to match demands in the medium term. In this rapidly changing market environment, assembly lines must quickly adapt to changes in order to remain competitive. Therefore, an approach for assembly line balancing was developed, which allows a faster adjustment of assembly lines in order to respond to fluctuations in demand. This approach focuses on two aspects: to respond to quantity as well as model-mix fluctuations. In order to increase volume flexibility, workers are allocated to the assembly stations thus pre-planned cycle times can be operated without the need of huge rebalancing. Furthermore to accomplish more flexibility in variants, operations are assigned to stations according to their impact on the assembly task time.

In recent years, human-robot co-operation has been of increasing interest in research, and new types of modern safety technology have emerged on the market. These include safety sensors, machine vision based safety systems, laser sensors and safety controllers for robots. The new technology enables flexible fenceless safety systems and dynamic safety regions alongside a host of other attractive features for human-robot co-operation. The safety systems can also be integrated into a transferable robotic platform. While this modern technology opens up wholly new possibilities, it also creates new and fairly complex challenges in safety design. This paper introduces some case examples of handling these challenges.

As manufactured products become increasingly more complex, generating machining toolpaths to manufacture these products are also becoming more complicated. Toolpath generation algorithms struggle when dealing with large numbers of data points due to the complex features on a design. In this research, a genetic algorithm is proposed to solve a variation of the travelling salesperson problem to generate a machining toolpath. Genetic algorithms are a more flexible approach to generating toolpaths as it is independent of the geometry of the part. Novel algorithms for the fitness function and mutation operator are proposed to ensure an optimal toolpath is generated without the genetic algorithm converging prematurely.

The Project CustomPacker - Highly Customizable and Flexible Packaging Station for mid- to upper-sized electronic consumer goods using Industrial Robots aims to design a flexible and scalable packaging cell for heavy electronic consumer goods. In this project human-robot-collaboration is used for the packaging task to reduce the cycle time. Human-robot-collaboration demands some specific targets, for example safety aspects and ergonomic issues. Within the project, the robot, the gripping mechanism and other components were developed and built up. This paper introduces a method to develop such handling systems. The procedure adepts the ”Münchner Vorgehensmodell” to the special requirements of packaging systems.

Path planning for serial 6 degree of freedom (DOF) robot based systems is challenging due to their kinematic structure, the behaviour of robot based on the configuration, and singularity conditions. Understanding the singularity conditions and zones is critical for both single robot applications, and robot cells. Visual representations of singularity zones will help process designers develop valid travel paths and layout designs. MATLAB tools are employed to represent the singularity zones using fundamental kinematic equations. The target application for this research is the FANUC family of serial 6 DOF robots, and the identified singularity regions are plotted in 2D and 3D Cartesian space.

Optimal serial 6 degree of freedom (DOF) robot path planning has challenges due to the kinematic structures, singularity conditions, and the practical reach limits due to the a path-fixture-end effector orientation and design-robot structure combination. Previous research has been done to define and visualize the functional reach limits for a robot-end effector orientation-end effector tool geometry set. This is expanded and combined with singularity region analyses to be able to visualize the total effective travel path regions for a target application (i.e., FANUC, ABB, or Comau robot families) using the MATLAB toolbox. Visualization tools that represent both the functional work region or work window and singularity regions are presented. This research will provide designers the ability to assess a wide range of industrial robot configurations comprehensively at the design or redesign stages as the valid bounded region defined in this work can be employed for subsequent downstream optimization related to velocity and acceleration control.

Part singulation and feeding is an integral part of the automated assembly process. This paper presents a singulator designed for part feeding in dynamic manufacturing environments characterised by frequent product changeovers, where conventional, part specific singulators are not effective. The presented singulator design is intended for use in a reconfigurable assembly system. The important design considerations during the development of the singulator are discussed. The stepped conveyor singulator exhibits flexibility, since in a given configuration allows the singulation of a family of parts with similar envelopes, and reconfigurability, since it can be configured for the singulation of families of parts with different envelopes.

Tablet-PCs and Smartphones are starting to be established in the field of production engineering as planning and communication devices. Today’s available mobile Augmented Reality (AR) tools are often results of technology driven development processes or adaptions of traditional desktop based systems. In contrary, the approach presented in this paper is introducing a systematic development process for mobile AR-applications. By using mobile AR-applications, established workflows should not be substituted, but systematically extend by new functionalities and interactive means. The approach focuses on two main areas: the user’s needs and the capabilities offered by tablet-PCs.

The mechatronic development of today’s products in mechanical and plant construction effects on the close interaction of the three disciplines mechanics, electronics and informatics whereupon a high level of integration prevails. While yesterday’s processes were mainly affected by serial engineering, tomorrow’s processes have to adapt to the continuously rising software contribution in order to manufacture dependable products and to cope with the various demands of customers and markets. This paper presents an analysis of today’s processes and leads to diverse approaches yielding agile practices into the engineering of mechatronic products in mechanical and plant construction.

Agent Based Control (ABC) has been used widely in research into Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs), but industry is hesitant to adopt ABC. Therefore object-oriented programming (OOP) is considered here as an alternative, since it is more widely used and has many capabilities that are valuable when implementing an RMS. Using the key characteristics for RMSs and the critical factors for holonic system architectures, agents are compared to OOP, evaluating the functionality that OOP can provide for reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The paper shows that OOP offers significant advantages for the control of less complex systems and where timing is more critical.

Most researchers in reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) have used the agent based control (ABC) approach, because the capabilities of agent based software and their development platforms make it easier and quicker to test their research. Due to the reluctance of industries to adopt ABC, this paper considers the factors that would affect the choice of alternatives for ABC, with an emphasis on cell-level control rather than on factory-level control or production planning related aspects. The paper shows that design considerations include reconfiguration level, self-reconfiguration intelligence and controller platform splitting. Some design choices will lead to ABC having significant advantages, while others will allow the use of software approaches more often used in industry.

Information technology tool chains are an integral component within development processes. When aligned optimally and adapted to the particular company’s needs, they ensure process efficiency and product quality while transforming an initial idea into a mature solution. The increasing amount of discipline specific software tools in combination with the heterogeneous mixture of these tools from different software suppliers outline today’s challenge in finding the optimal tailored IT tool chain. This paper describes a methodology that assesses the holistic performance of digital engineering tool chains and establishes a performance index for comparing various chains with each other by a hierarchy-oriented weighted scoring method.

The tool path trajectory generation for CNC machining has been a main topic in the improvement of the manufacturing process for many years. Different approaches tried to merge efficiency and minimal tool wear with reasonable computing times. A smooth curvature progression of the tool path is a main requirement to limit jerks in all axes and thus ensure minimal tool wear. Currently this requirement is met by constructing tool paths with polynomials or smoothing simpler linear and circular curves. This paper presents an alternative interpolation method based on curvature-smooth clothoids.

Volatile influences from global markets force manufacturing companies to be more flexible, innovative and efficient. Implementing these attributes in products, processes and production resources, requires a high rate of change in development periods of decreasing lengths. The increasing level of perceived complexity is a critical result of these changes. Manifold approaches were developed and studies were conducted to derive measures for complex issues. But in the industrial field, the usability of such measures poses a major challenge. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the scientific and the practical perspective on complexity and extract three basic complexity cases. On this basis, our procedure supports the systematic analysis, classification and quantification of complex issues in automotive production. The approach has been successfully applied in an industrial use case of an automotive assembly line.

An assembly process plan for a given product provides the sequence of assembly operations, operation times as well as the required tools and fixtures for each operation. Much research has been done on automating and optimizing assembly sequence generation as being the most important part of an assembly process plan. This paper proposes a novel method for generating the assembly sequence of a given product based on available assembly sequence data of similar products. The proposed method uses a binary tree form to represent the assembly sequences of an existing family of products. A Genetic Algorithm is employed to find the consensus tree that represents the set of all assembly sequence trees with minimum total dissimilarity distance. This is similar to defining Generic Bill-of-Material (GBOM). The generated consensus tree serves as a master assembly sequence for the product family. The assembly sequence for a new variant that falls within, or significantly overlaps with, the scope of the considered family of products can be directly extracted from that master assembly sequence tree. The proposed novel method greatly simplifies and enhances automatic assembly sequence generation. It helps reduce assembly planning cost and improve productivity.

Haptic devices are more and more common for human computer interaction or human machine interaction type applications. Using such devices multimodal interaction can be realized, increasing this way immersibility in the virtual reality environment. This paper presents specific considerations regarding the optimal design process of a class of reconfigurable haptic devices. The main focus of the paper is on the presentation of the novel ReHapy concept and on the details regarding the formulation of the cost function on which the optimal design process will be based.

It is well known that industrial processes require large consumption of energy and other resources in the realization of products. This exploitation of energy is reflected on the environment, in terms of environmental impact, and on the ecosystem of the entire supply chain, in terms of social and economic impacts, which can be measured through specific tools. The measurement of these environmental, social and economic impacts is an essential step towards both the process monitoring and sustainability energy assessment. Numerous studies have recently been focused on industrial energy use and energy efficiency in various manufacturing sectors.

The aim of this work is to define a new methodology to monitoring the extrusion process and to realize the sustainable manufacturing. This method can be seen as a joint venture between monitoring system and LCA analysis related to the process.

Changing conditions in the business environment of manufacturing companies lead to new challenges for the operation of factories. Especially, rising energy prices, stricter statutory requirements as well as environmental awareness of customers, cause higher requirements in terms of energy efficiency. Among other, the behaviour of employees and their environmental awareness have an impact on energy consumption within the factory. This paper shows an approach to increase energy efficiency in factory operations by consideration of employee behaviour. The approach includes basic requirements for stimulating energy-efficient behaviour and presents ways of improved employee participation in process of increasing energy efficiency.

In the industry, Lean Production Systems have been successfully used for years to reduce inventories and lead times. The Value-Stream Mapping Method (VSM) has proven itself to be the best practice tool for this purpose. With this method process steps can easily be divided into value-adding and non value-adding ones. However, the VSM does not provide any information about the process energy consumption and, as a consequence, it does not give any hint at how much of the energy used actually serves value-adding purposes. Would it be known how much energy is used for value-adding and for non value-adding process steps, then it would be possible to optimize value-streams in a holistic way, simultaneously considering time and energy consumption. This paper describes how the VSM can be extended to an Energy Value- Stream Mapping Method (EVSM) while maintaining its original character and its inner logic.

Throughout the last century, the world has witnessed a major paradigm shift migrating from traditional mass production concept to agile, lean and reconfigurable manufacturing systems; Concepts that are believed to become major enablers for economic growth of developing countries. Example of which was China, one of the fastest growing giants that capitalized on these technologies in order to achieve leapfrogging steps and compete at the economic frontier. This brings into focus more challenging questions: what are the key factors that should exist in industrial SMEs in developing countries in order for them to guarantee a successful transfer of these industrial technologies? And what is the ideal ecosystem that should exist in order to sustain the adoption of such new concepts? This paper contributes to the literature of industrial engineering by studying all key factors that should exist in the Egyptian SMEs in order to guarantee a successful transfer of latest industrial technologies. Those key factors are determined and validated through industrial and academic experts, then categorized into a hierarchal structure according to their characteristics. Technological appropriateness, Government & Economy and External factors are three main categories on top of the hierarchy in which multiple factor exist. These factors are relatively evaluated using the AHP technique and simple rank order, in order to determine the value of each factor or group. The developed model will assist mangers and policy makers to successfully plan for more competitive and efficient manufacturing systems for the Egyptian SMEs.

A company’s success depends more than ever on its strategic, international dimension and its global presence. Another key factor for the success of a company lies in the extent to which the product portfolios take account of the demands of local markets. Growing prosperity, demographic change as well as increasing international competitive pressure urge companies to adapt products and its production systems. The advantages of the planning approach depicted in this paper are to be found in shorter planning times, shorter time-to-market and the opportunity to suggest a decision at the beginning of the product engineering process regarding a product and production system alternative. The consideration of local production capacities, the analysis of possible production costs of different production systems and the consideration of factors of uncertainty (number of units, costs, etc.) of future planning periods present a huge challenge.

Nowadays production systems are faced with new turbulences in energy-markets due to the increasing use of renewable energy sources. Therefore, production systems and their machines have to be energy flexible. This paper provides an approach for evaluating energy flexibility of production machines based on a Petri-net modelling of machine behaviour. Furthermore, an application of the evaluation on two different machines is given.

The paper reviews the development of quality management and production theory in the industrial revolution. It is shown that existing production theories focus and explain the logistical transformation processes while leaving the notion of customer satisfaction and requirements transformation open. In the following chapters a concept for a new quality oriented production theory is presented which explains structure and behaviour of product realization processes. It is shown that the time weighted requirements/ specification and their completion level can serve as the central parameter in order to model product realization processes and to provide suggestions for the realization process management.

Since the earliest attempts of addressing the problem of developing a coordinated link in a supply chain (SC) in 1959, managing SC performance has been a main challenge among enterprises. Supply chain planning (SCP), as one of the most important processes within the supply chain management (SCM) concept, has a great impact on firms’ success or failure. In this paper, a mathematical model for planning a SC of a computer accessory manufacturing company operating in a build-to-order (BTO) environment is developed. The developed multi-product, multi-period, multi-echelon mixedinteger linear programming model is then solved using CPLEX optimization studio and guidance related to future areas of research is given.

Manufacturing companies have to keep abreast of established and emerging manufacturing technologies to take advantage of opportunities arising from the application of innovative technologies and to become aware of potential threats. Identifying and keeping track of available technologies at all times is a complex and very time-consuming task. However, in a competitive environment the capability to react to changing conditions quickly is crucial. Therefore, this paper presents an approach called technology screening which combines technology identification and preselection according to the company-specific technology strategy and future manufacturing requirements.

Coordination of distributed production between different enterprises is seen to be the major future challenge in production management. The success of enterprises no longer only depends on their own performance, but on the performance of the entire production network they are situated in. This paper aims to link appropriate coordination modes and instruments with different types of production networks of small and medium sized enterprises to achieve most production network performance.

The production network, an organizational structure between markets and corporate hierarchies, holds a certain potential to cope with turbulence. In manufacturing, this potential becomes feasible in additional agility options due to the pooling and allying of network resources. This paper presents an overview on different types of mutual network resource usage. Therefore, redundant and complementary network resources as well as network slack are analyzed regarding their potential for agility gains to proactively relocate the corridor of flexibility. The finding of this paper is a set of requirements, which the agility enablers need to share to increase agility meanwhile minimizing opportunistic behavior.

The increase in product disposal rates and the speed of technology development are creating a new challenge in the waste management field. In this context, it is becoming even more important to evaluate the impacts of products at their End of Life (EoL), during the early design stage. The paper presents an approach to determine the most convenient EoL scenario for each product component from an environmental and economical point of view. The designer is aided in making choices through five EoL indices, one for each EoL scenario (Reuse, Remanufacturing, Recycle, Incineration and Landfill). The EoL indices have been used to evaluate the environmental and economical sustainability of the EoL scenarios for a cooker hood during a re-design process.

Data exchange between applications and servers is always a risky theme from the IT department point of view, because confidential data has to be kept secure. Usual direct connections make it necessary to get approved by the IT department before they can be used inside of the company what makes it expensive and takes a lot of time. The concept shows the possibilities of an alternative approach by connecting applications via the browser control element to a server and the corresponding opportunities as well as the advantages in saving the main program logic server side.

Companies of the manufacturing industry gather a high number of different high-resolution data concerning production and manufacturing processes. Advanced Planning and Scheduling Systems use these data sets collected on the shop-floor in order to adjust their scheduling for near- and middle-term production orders. Usually, the quality of these production feedback data is reduced by inconsistencies and errors which impairs the results of the planning process. The consequence is a low adherence to planned delivery dates. In this paper typical data inconsistencies are analysed for their rate of occurrence and an approach for reducing data inconsistencies by applying association rule induction is proposed.

Strategic decisions in early production planning phases have a high impact on various production aspects. Decision making is often based on vague expert knowledge due to lack of a reliable knowledge base. Implications of this problem are especially observable in the field of assembly planning, which integrates results from various planning disciplines. The proposed paper introduces a new concept and the corresponding data model for application of Data Mining methods in the field of production assembly planning and product design. The concept presents assistance potentials and prototypical implementation for development of new products variants along the product emergence process (PEP).

Influence variables can have a huge impact on the process and machine’s behaviour during the production process and as a result on the product quality. Although process knowledge, methods for data base and regression analyses are available, it is still difficult to identify all relevant parameters and find their effect on the process.

The method, described in this paper, shows how all relevant parameters can be found by using a holistic approach. Through filtering, the total number of variables can be diminished as far as possible. For each variable a description about its impact on the process is designed and based on this, different actions can be derived to compensate or minimize the influences.

Due to individual requirements of economic actors, remanufacturing companies face the challenge of an increasing variety as well as the associated complexity. Therefore, a successful complexity management, created upon detailed knowledge of drivers and effects, is necessary. To close the lack of knowledge, the main complexity drivers and effects within the production organisation of remanufacturing companies are identified. Furthermore, common optimisation methods to manage this drivers and effects are assessed and the best ranked methods are shown within this paper. For the complexity effects, which occur the most and with a low number of available optimisation methods, new methods are presented.

The use of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) is seen as the strategy for producers to respond to variable market demands. The created possibilities for reconfiguration mean an increase in complexity for the process planning. This increased complexity of the planning process can be handled with knowledge based systems. Therefore, this paper describes how a knowledge model for designing an optimization process can be realized to be used in combination with a multi-agent system. The knowledge model describes the knowledge of the manufacturing planning experts to be deployed in the developed planning system. The great complex correlations, which have to be represented in this knowledge-integrated planning tool, can be integrated into an agent-based software system. Agents have the potential to process these complex data volumes and are used to construct the knowledge-integrated planning tool in this research work. A prototype has been developed, which is able to create the configuration of transfer centres by processing a given process plan.

In this contribution a methodology for a multi-criteria decision-support for manufacturing process chain selection in the context of functionally graded components is presented. The basis for this decision-support is provided by a framework for the computer-aided planning and optimisation of manufacturing process chains of functionally graded components, which is still under development. To distinguish between several alternative process chains it is necessary to consider those decision criteria that can not explicitly be specified within the CAD model. A matrix-supported algorithm guarantees a consistent weighting of these decision criteria while enabling a fine-granular rating scale. As a result, a ranking of the different process chains is achieved that constitutes the basis for the decision maker to select the favourite alternative.

Within the framework of inspection planning, quality inspections for the entire production process from goods receipt to dispatch are established. As the quality inspections ensure that the manufactured product corresponds to the quality demands derived from the customer requirements, they have a significant influence on customer satisfaction and resulting economic success.

This publication presents a model based on decision theory for planning quality inspections in the entire production process. The model considers that decisions (e. g. with respect to inspection extend) need to be made during inspection planning, whose profitability depends on environmental states, that have a certain probability such as defect frequency, for example. The goal of the model is to enable cost-efficient decisions in consideration of the companies risk attitude regarding the outcome of the inspection plan (e. g. defects perceived by the customer).

Knowledge management within manufacturing networks allows an efficient integration of distributed business processes in order to realise a common value creation. There are enormous potentials to accelerate the common innovation development or to cut costs through the harmonisation of cross-company value chains. Although the science and industrial community is aware of this, the potentials arising from a collaborative use of knowledge in networks have not been entirely exploited yet. The Hamburg Model offers a general guideline for developing a systematic management of knowledge within value creation networks, which is supplemented by a context-dependent, dynamic qualitative model that takes the relevant impact factors of a specific case of application into account.

In today’s ever faster changing economy it is crucial to adapt the production of a company in shorter intervals. Many change processes fail, often due to the resistance of the workforce. Approaches on the field of change management address this issue, but do often not consider the special circumstances in production. Learning factories are designed to meet these requirements, but usually focus on the aspect of qualification. This paper describes how change processes in production can be supported by learning factories by offering a test bed for new ideas, qualification and communication through participation.

The research concerns a make to order manufacturing environment and two classes of customers who submit orders. The core customers have a contract with the firm at fixed services level (price and due date). The short-term customers submit the orders based on the price set by the firm. In this paper, it is proposed a pricing policy based on fuzzy logic to set the price for the short-term customers. The fuzzy approach captures the state of the manufacturing systems in terms of congestion in order to set the price. The policy proposed is compared to a fixed price, and to a state-dependent policy based on three levels of price. A discrete event simulation environment is used to test the proposed approach in a static, dynamic environment and considering the reliability of the manufacturing system. The simulation results show how the proposed approach outperforms the other policies in all conditions tested.

Varying demand and supply mark challenges for production planning. Particularly in seasonal environments, the major part of production concentrates in short periods of time during the year. The volume of demand and supply and the timing of the seasonal changes are hard to predict.

In the following, different braches that unterly seasonal fluctations are presented. Based on expert interviews causes for seasonalities are classified and practices for an adequate handling are explained.

The concept of viral engineering tries to tackle the coordination of independent development cells within a temporary network and so takes advantage of the dynamic market environment. The interdisciplinary connected development parties are based on their competences to support the creation of cross-functional knowledge supporting the innovation process. The connection of the participants requires a conceptual communication that is carried out within the viral description framework (VDF) enabling the product description to hold product relevant data for interdisciplinary development and agile manufacturing using semantic technologies. The VDF assimilates interdisciplinary description and knowledge for an equal understanding of the participating parties.

Manufacturing co-operations, innovation think tanks and technology clusters are well-known and profitable elements of a modern company’s structure. The fast pace of typical product life cycles and innovation rates make it necessary to gain as much external knowledge as possible to optimise supply chain organisation. The aim of this quantitative, empirical study is to develop strategic guidelines out of the most influential success factors of manufacturing co-operations. These guidelines should be reconfigurable and easily adoptable to the situations co-operations regularly face. In order to reach these objectives the authors identified 110 success factors and analysed their cross-factorial relationships. Strategic guidelines were then formed and were evaluated by 16 senior managers of various fields, e.g. the aviation and space, transportation, strategy consulting and publishing industry. On average these managers direct 1247 employees.

Manufacturing enterprises are facing challenges from their internal and external environments to maintain their competitive advantage. Transparency, flexibility and adaptability are indispensable. However, the enterprises face the dilemma to monitor and control the success and effectiveness of continual improvement programs. The computation of financial and operational metrics assists to partially to measure the success of these programs. However, it would be advantageous to compute the financial metrics in real-time, similar to the computation of operational metrics. In the presented research, attempts are made to compute cost surrounding manufacturing processes in real-time, which can be aggregated to calculate different financial metrics.

In order to obtain even more competitive and efficient electric motors, it is necessary to take into, during the account design phase, not only the electromagnetic performances, but also the environmental impact and Life Cycle Cost (LCC). The paper presents a methodology and a software tool for the evaluation of the LCC of electric motors (particular attention is reserved to the manufacturing and use costs), yet during the early design phases. The integration of the proposed tool in a larger platform, to consider also the environmental impacts and motor performances, is also presented. The cost estimation tool has been tested for small sized asynchronous single-phase electric motors for household appliances.

The following article presents a methodology for factory design projects in the maritime industry. Therefore the special requirements for the planning of maritime production facilities are introduced regarding the different planning steps in factory design. Based on that, an integrated methodology is presented to fulfill these special requirements and ensure valuable planning results. Approaches of the methodology are the application of type representatives, material flow simulation and layout planning algorithms. Finally the methodology is implemented in a software tool which supports the planner in factory design projects in the maritime industry.

The usable wind energy increases exponentially by increasing the height of wind turbine generators. The material requirements and the tower weight increases disproportionately high by growing tower height. In current designs, the height of towers is limited. The application of lightweight design concepts in the production of wind turbine tower sections can lead to a reduction in the weight with the same tower stiffness. Therefore lightweight designs have great potential to increase wind turbine efficiency. In this paper, the results of the research for lightweight concepts and their implementation on towers and a guiding systematic approach are presented. As part of the research, design concepts have been developed. These design concepts allow the mass reduction, with constant stiffness, for the wind turbine towers on land (onshore). Several investigation loops of these lightweight designs were run. Different concepts of bionics, aviation, aerospace and automotive have been investigated for their suitability in wind turbine towers. A suitable concept was identified based on trapezoidal sheets. Using these sheets, the weight of towers can be reduced by 20%.

Today producing companies are facing an unpredictable and unstable market situation. Because of the strong customer orientation in the consumer goods industry, the Miele & Cie. KG is also affected by these incidents. The results are an increasing number of variants and a shortening of model life cycles. To ensure the long-term competitiveness, adapted strategies must be developed. A major challenge arises, particularly for press shops, because of the distinct difference between the constant long life of press systems and the decreasing model life cycle of the manufactured products. As a basis for the planning of a new press system, only the data of the current production and the next generation are available, which covers a time period of about ten years. The subsequent type of use of the press and the related requirements for the following 20 - 30 years cannot be planned. To ensure the sustainable planning of press shops, a holistic methodology is developed which involves the aspects of changeability. This includes the selection of the press system with appropriate press drive, tool change, transfer, etc. Further aspects like choice of site, assembly and material flow are considered.

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) have been an increasing area of interest in the research arena. However, it seems that current literature is lacking application and implementation cases where RMS are simulated, tested, and evaluated as a feasible manufacturing concept. A Manufacturer of Consumer Goods identified the potential of the RMS concept and decided to investigate the concept in a real production installation. The result of this development is a proof of concept of a changeable and reconfigurable assembly and decoration system based on the principles of RMS. This proof of concept is meant primarily to show the physical feasibility of the system and provide a first-look into a real production application of the RMS ideas. The purpose of this paper is to present the design of the manufacturer’s RMS proof of concept, its implementation, and evaluation results.

This paper aims to provide information on process improvement for energy-efficient manufacturing. A machine tool is the most energy consuming equipment in plants. There are effective ways to reduce energy consumption of machine tools such as reducing required energy, shutting down the power to standby equipment, and shortening the cycle time. This paper introduces several approaches for process improvement such as optimizing the cutting conditions and the inclination angle of the tool in 5-axis machining. Minimizing use of fluid and using control functions are also effective.

This paper examines the most important changes to the traditional automotive supply chain needed for the introduction of electric vehicles. Potential critical components of electric vehicles have been also considered. An empirical investigation was carried out to analyse these aspects and to understand enterprises perceptions about the development of the electric vehicle market. Data were collected using an on-line questionnaire and then analysed by a principal component analysis and a statistical analysis. The aim of the survey was also to evaluate which sort of electric vehicle and body style enterprises are investing more, as well as the degree of importance they attribute to the electric vehicle market.

Electric vehicles are widely regarded as one solution of future mobility. However, they still pose multifarious challenges as the increase in demand for electric vehicles, the diversity of battery variants, the development of new battery designs and the alternative usable manufacturing technologies in the production process. Hence a battery assembly which enables its changeability and its reuse is required. Furthermore expensive raw materials, safety aspects and a so far not fully automated process chain require the integration of quality assurance aspects during assembly planning. Therefore product developers and machinery and plant engineers are supported in planning a quality ensured changeable and reusable - a so called multi-use - battery assembly. To this end, a configurator has to be developed to provide the planner a decision support. The configurator has to deduce from product-specifications single assembly stations for its battery assembly, evaluates them regarding their changeability and reuse as well as the OEE and costs of the entire assembly line and gives a prioritized list of assembly alternatives as the output.