Autor: Bernd Scholz-Reiter

The transparency of location and status of loadings and load carriers is particularly important for efficient warehouse management on seaport terminals. Today detection of load carrier movement processes and modified status information is insufficiently supported by software systems. An automated IT-based load carrier management system offers a wide range of opportunities for tracking and tracing positions and status information of loadings and load carriers. A permanent monitoring of changes regarding location and status allows the usage of innovative stock-keeping strategies, search time reduction, decrease of relocation processes and overall an improvement of the traffic flow on the seaport terminal area. This article addresses the design and modelling of a system that enables automated detection of location and status of load carriers on seaport terminals combining innovative information and communication technologies for identification, communication and localisation tasks. ...

The article describes the quality inspection of micro cold formed components in the collaborative research center 747 “micro cold forming” at the University of Bremen. These components, e.g. small springs in cell phones, are manufactured with a speed of up to 300 parts per minute in a micro cold forming machine. Overall dimensions are below 1mm. These dimensions lie in a field between tactile measuring techniques of form and position and surface metrology, e.g. roughness. Yet a high inspection rate is impossible due to problems in production engineering and metrology. Therefore, fast optical metrology, new evaluation methods and quality control is needed to ensure an economical manufacturing process for micro cold formed parts.

In the past the dynamics of the markets in interaction with an increasing globalization led to the fact that industries concentrated more and more on their core competences. By the reduction of the companies vertical integration value-added processes were outsourced in the same measure as supporting activities. In order to be able to meet the so developing complexity, production and logistics networks were formed to enhance the co-operation between the enterprises in a long-term and stable form. In these networks beside products and semi-finished materials also knowledge and information are produced and transferred. The protection and division of knowledge, experience and behaviours are of a special relevance if e.g. a participant leaves the network. In such a case the question arises whether and how the knowledge of the separating participant can be particularly retained for the network and a possible advancing producer, in order to not disturb the efficiency of the network. For the ...

To prepare employees for structural changes within the organization is crucial for the competitiveness of an enterprise. Pretty often changes in an organization are enabled and driven by technological innovations, e.g. information and communications technologies. The arising information and qualification deficit of the employees has to be faced with respect to the changed organizational environment. In this article we describe how these effects can be faced with the methodology of business simulation games.

The market-oriented product development describes a focusing of needs, which leads ideally to high product quality and profitability. In the context of “Digital Factory” this paper focuses on the integrated product and process design, which is oriented to the physical part of the product. Due to the high product complexity, shorter product life cycles and increased competition situation is the product development faced with new challenges. Both the speed and the quality of planning should be improved further. Only the combination of organizational approaches and information technologies like for example “Simultaneous Engineering” and the “Digital Factory” promises a sufficient increase of planning efficiency. The following paper deals with existing methodologies and promising approaches in the field of “Digital Factory” against the background of an integrated product and process design. Referring to the requirements of logistics planning, an early integration of ...

Modern information technolgies are essential for efficient processes in logistics. Concepts which base intensively on IT have become known as e-logistics. This article discusses the idea of e-logistics and relates it to different concepts within services in logistics. Therefore necessary technologies to realise e-logistics are introduced. As an example the technologies and developments of tracking-and-tracing are detailed.

In recent years dynamics in the automotive industry has increased rapidly. Beside a higher degree of customer orientation product life cycles become continuously shorter, whereby an over-all effect on Ramp-up and Phase-out Management can be stated. Because of an increasing amount of new model ranges Ramp-up Management has been well discussed during the last few years. In contrast, discussions about an efficient Phase-out Management are mostly still missing. This paper presents an approach focusing on the transparency of information considering the requirements of Production Phase-outs.

The bullwhip effect leads to instabilities in supply chains. Research on this phenomenon stresses the normative approach. This means that the causes of the bullwhip effect are identified within the structure and processes of the supply chain. However, the bullwhip effect persists even when the operational causes are under control, or when demand information is stationary and known to all parties. Most of all, the influence of behavioural decision making on the bullwhip effect has been underestimated. This is why the paper strives to shed light on this aspect by resorting to a simulation game, the supply net game, for learning inventory control in production networks. The experimental results, involving 130 participants, show that the decision pattern of counterintuitive decision making produces and reinforces what it is thought to lessen namely the bullwhip effect. This happens whenever the participants restrain from ordering while backlogs are building up or continue to order while ...

Due to the increasing globalization of commodity flow a growth of mass good transportation is perceptible. Therefore automatic unloading of goods and their automatic transfer to logistic systems is one of the technical challenges. Opportunities arising from automatic goods unloading are explored in [1]. A system for unloading cubic goods automatically was developed and its introduction to market started last year. Changing environments and various operational areas are the motivation for research on a cognitive system for unloading goods. Hence, a concept for a cognitive system for unloading containers is introduced in this article. The components for such a system are image processing, robot control handling system and kinematics. For each of these components cognitive methods and technologies are proposed to be integrated in an overall system.

Planning and control of logistics processes is more and more determined by an increasing complexity of structure of logistics networks and dynamics. However, in many aspects methods and tools for a comprehensive analysis of large-scale logistics networks are missing. This set of problems is the object of investigation in the new research project ‘Stability, Robustness and Approximation of Dynamic Large-Scale Networks - Theory and Applications in Logistics Networks’ founded by Volkswagen Foundation. The project will be run in a dual way: Mathematicians from the university of Bremen und the university of Würzburg cooperate with researchers from the field of engineering of the university of Bremen.