Autor: Hartmut Höhns

Very often the redesign or optimisation of production systems, the shop floor or even entire plants is delegated to external specialists respectively consultancies or planning offices. Over many years and as well many projects they have gathered tremendous experiences in order to accomplish large-scale industrial projects. As a result of these experiences planning offices often develop their own special procedure models and tools to cope with the vast variety of different requirements of their customers and furthermore to create a distinctive profile or even some kind of a trade mark.

Recent investigations concerning the international state of the art of micro production technology [1, 2] showed, that it has to be distinguished between two main development directions regarding the manufacturing of function units on the one hand as well as complete products on the other hand. First of all there are the classical precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods [3, 4], e.g. according to the DIN 8580 [5]. Secondly manufacturing methods from the area of microsystems technology have been observed [3, 4]. The integration process of different product functions into one part or component geometry, which is running parallel to the miniaturisation, is a specific challenge regarding the field of micro manufacturing [1]. This affects especially the product and production process development, concerning the precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods. This paper addresses problems regarding the operations management of precision-engineering-oriented micro-production ...

Complex production systems in micro production, concerning the manufacturing of miniaturised systems, assemblies and components, are very special. For example Hesselbach [1] stated, that micro production technology (sometimes to be found as (ultra) precision engineering) spans basically all, partly highly specialised production techniques. Kiesewetter [2] points out, that micro production is not just a kind of “shrinked machine building or mechanical engineering”. Mostly the whole manufacturing process chain or at least larger, interrelated section or subsystems and -processes, for example mainly for the manufacturing of miniaturised mechanical modules or assemblies respectively, are basically not examined. The paper discusses and presents topics concerning the planning and operations of micro production manufacturing process chains, against the background of the manufacturing of miniaturised mechanical modules and components.

Control of dynamics and complexity of logistic systems will continue to gain in importance in the future. One possibility to cope with this challenge is the concept of autonomous logistic processes. This article addresses the issue of requirements to a method for modelling autonomous logistic processes as well as the development of the method. It gives an overview of the created modelling and view concepts.

The fact that the ramp-up phase is a highly critical and economically important stadium within the product lifecycle for both suppliers and OEMs implies that an efficient product change management is applied to meet the goals of cost, quality, and time. This article introduces a combined management concept called hybrid product change management. By recombining existing management solutions, such as the standard processes matching certain product change types and the product change processes based on process elements, enterprise networks are enabled to coordinate all product change projects. This aspect is described further by giving an idea of how this hybrid product change management can be supported in terms of information and communication technology and knowledge management.

The handling of complex technical changes still is a highly critical process within the industrial practice. Hence, it very often comes to critical scenarios concerning key operating figures like time, product quality or expenses, which troubles the coordinated start of operations or the running of serial production. The aim of the article is to introduce a bundle of methods, which helps to integrate the process- and product views of the different engineering partners, in order to increase transparency and efficiency for the collaborative processing of product changes within engineering networks.

The design and implementation of knowledge-based control systems is always a major challenge, especially if a maximum realistic approach is pursued. Especially, adequately handling large scale, real world problems, often confronts the concerned project members with insolvable tasks. This article outlines the mutual basis of knowledge management and knowledge engineering plus the challenges en route to acquisition. Solutions to formalise needed knowledge are proposed against the backdrop of a currently running research project in the field of supply chain management with multi-agent systems.