Autor: Eberhard Abele

Considering the background of the Energiewende challenges like energy efficiency and flexibility become more important for the industrial production. A smart building automation system is able to decrease energy costs and improve the performance of supply systems. Model-based predictive control (MPC) is a suitable approach to optimize complex energetic systems as presented in the ETA model factory at Technical University of Darmstadt.

Both globalization and digitalization yield high potential for an efficient exchange and use of information on the one hand, but on the other hand also require new levels of data management and security. In order to be able to exploit the full return on innovation, original producers need to secure their knowledge and competitive advantage, not ignoring the rising risk of being imitated any longer. Nowadays it is not sufficient to simply reduce the length of innovation cycles. Instead, companies have to actively invest into anti-counterfeiting measures in order to secure their local and global competitive advantage. Requirements relating to the security and effectivity of technical anti-counterfeiting concepts, and the development of such a security measure, are the subject of this article.

In order to improve action-oriented trainings, in this paper an approach for results-based evaluation by using evaluation tasks is presented. Thus weaknesses of current programs can be identified and trainings can be continuously improved.

Global megatrends such as the increasing urbanization of living environments and economic areas, the climate change and the increased meaning of work-life-balance require new production and logistics concepts. An opportunity to cope with the linked challenges offers the concept of urban value creation. This kind of value creation reveals chances for the participating stakeholders when ecologically, economically and socially acceptable designed. This article addresses the challenges and potentials linked with urban value creation and shows production-related and logistical approaches to design a sustainable, city-compatible urban value creation.

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in industry, which has not only ecological but also economic reasons. Thereby, the competitiveness of the industry is increasingly influenced by the incurred energy costs. In order to achieve ambitious targets of energy saving in a company, existing potentials must be consistently exploited. Furthermore it is not enough to focus solely on technical measures. Instead, more factors must be considered which make it possible to achieve these ambitious goals. To identify areas where energy demand is affected in the economy in this article various potentials are derived in order to achieve the economic potential by taking other factors into account.

The concern of an interdisciplinary research project called Dynamo PLV from institutes of the TU Darmstadt and the European Business School is to combine the three topics production, logistics and traffic and merge them together. Goal of the project is to generate holistic approaches to resolve disciplinary boundaries. Integrated value adding networks which can already be located in the automotive industry will have strong effects on competitiveness of industrial locations in the future. This calls for an overlapping consideration of the systems production, logistics and traffic. Aim of this paper is to show and identify the differing interests and conflicts between the actors of a value adding network from the automotive industry. Conflicting goals between multi-layers like intra-company areas (logistics and procurement) or areas along the supply chain (supplier and OEM) or beyond the supply chain (companies and public authorities) prevent optimal resource use and reduce ...

Sustainability in lean production systems arises when the relevant lean principles are addressed by preferably all stakeholders in the context of permanent improvement processes. For this purpose a skills development of all employees is necessary, even for managers, as they convey the CIP position by their people skills and set an example. If this succeeds, improvement processes will develop into a sustainable learning process, which in turn serves as a self-reinforcing factor for the further development of staff skills. An approach to skills development and to the corresponding leadership system for improvement processes is presented and supported by preliminary results of an empirical study.

Product piracy has risen to a serious problem for almost every manufacturer in the capital goods industry. Especially if the customer unwittingly mistake counterparts for original products, the manufacturer will lose parts of reputation. So manufacturers have to expand their quality management with new tasks to ensure that their original products are delivered to their customers. A holistic anti-counterfeiting-strategy provides adequate counter measures for this challenge.

As a result of India’s increasing demand of machine tools India is attracting the attention of international machine tool manufacturers. To be competitive against international machine tool manufactures the German manufacturers must adapt their machine tool concepts to the specific requirements of the Indian manufacturing structure and offer machine tools according to the principal of avoidance of waste by offering exactly what the Indian customer needs. For this, the machine tools must be optimized to the parameters investment costs, running costs and cycle time. This article describes the requirements of the Indian machine tool end-users. a methodology is shown to optimize and develop machinetool-concept systematically to the Indian requirements.

The future of the German manufacturing sector and its seminal industry sectors is a matter of the corporate research project between McKinsey & Company and the Department for production management, technology and machine tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt. An innovative approach on segmenting different types of production within the manufacturing sector offers a differentiated view on the German production structure. A comparison with other European industrial nations offers the classification of the German manufacturing sector within an international context. Based on a status-quo scenario and with corresponding improvement methods for the production it is possible to set up a future scenario for strengthening the production in Germany.