Autor: Gunther Reinhart

The Green Factory Bavaria is a research project, in which a platform at several locations in Bavaria is developed, in order to increase the resource efficiency in manufacturing companies. The platform shall serve as research-, demonstration- and training purposes. In Augsburg a process chain was developed, which consists of an additive manufacturing step, a cleaning and a packaging step. The research foci of those areas as well as the training concept are going to be presented in this article.

The setup and configuration of industrial robots presumes a high degree of expert knowledge due to manufacturer specific control commands and a wide variety of design types. As a result, companies are running robot systems repetitively over long time periods instead of using their inherent flexibility. Therefore, in the research project AKOMI methods are being developed that allow automated setup and solution neutral programming of robot assisted assembly lines.

Experts shape theses about the trends of Industrie 4.0 in the fields of human, technology and organisation. Whereas Industrie 4.0 often focuses on the intelligent networking of technical objects, this contribution considers human and organizational aspects of mechatronic engineering of manufacturing systems. Thereto, the theses of Industrie 4.0 are compared with the Agile Manifesto and agile principles using the example of the agile framework Scrum, showing that agile engineering can provide an innovative approach to the efficient job design and organisation in the age of Industrie 4.0.

External turbulences affecting producing industries are increasing because of rising natural and geopolitical changes. Due to this extended turbulences the vulnerability of today’s highly linked and complex supply chains of producing companies is rising. In terms of avoiding actual and future instabilities, critical processes need to be designed robust and flexible and to be monitored continuously. In order to initiate the necessary actions to guarantee the security of supply, critical processes have to be identified. For the evaluation of actual or future critical processes criticality gets introduced. So the influence of extended turbulences can be identified and possible instabilities can be detected and anticipated.

Today’s production environment is characterized by an ongoing increase in complexity. Escalating product complexity leads to a more difficult design of manufacturing systems. At the same time, companies have to focus on their core competencies that force the growth of complex production networks being hard to handle. Additionally to the environment based by crises and peak stages, there is a trend of shorter product life cycles. Indeed, new technologies as RFID establish new innovative approaches for information acquisition in manufacturing, but in spite of technological progress, it pushes existing IT systems to its performance limits. Decentralized systems are supposed to remedy those problems, but despite of the scientifically proven performance those systems are only applied seldom due to missing transparency and possibilities of manipulation. Biomimetic approaches have great potential for optimizing processes and structures of manufacturing systems decentrally.

The increasing globalization gives western companies great new opportunities. Especially China gained increasing importance as a sourcing market in the last years. Despite these opportunities, a retreat of many companies from China could be witnessed recently. Among other factors, this is due to the fact that western companies cannot exert enough influence on the performance and price of their suppliers. This article presents tools and processes to successfully face this challenge and improve the own position of power as a customer.

The increasing competitive pressure leads to a reduction of the depth of value creation and therefore to a rising importance of suppliers. Additionally, globalization is the cause for a tighter international network in production. Asymmetries in interests can obstruct a cooperation between companies and may endanger the commercial success. The article describes asymmetries in interests in the cooperation with local as well as Chinese suppliers.