Autor: Klaus Schützer

Due to shorter product life cycle and increasing variants of products manufacturing companies have to be flexible in factory structures. Flexibility of factory structures is based on defined factory planning processes considering product, process and resource data resulting from various disciplines and isolated IT tools. Thus factory planning processes can be characterized as iterative, interdisciplinary and participative pro-cesses. To enforce the interdisciplinary and participative character, a federative factory data management (FFDM) as an integrative solution will be described. Product, process and resource data will be provided by web services resulting in acceleration of factory planning pro-cesses due to reduced redundancy, inhomogeneity and inconsistence in data holding.

The mould and die industry is characterized by permanently rising competitive pressure. Competitiveness has to be increased with higher productivity through declined machining times and costs as well as the same or higher quality of the products to be machined. A key technology to reach these objectives is the 5-Axes HSC machining of sculptured surfaces, whose potentials are currently used but not bailed out. Therefore the main objective of the BRAGECRIM pro-ject “Holistic Optimization of Sculptured Surface Manufacturing” (HoliMan) is to identify and exploit the production accuracy and efficiency increasing potential. In this project Brazilian and German researchers work together on the holistic optimization of sculptured surface manufacturing by considering the significant impacts of the manufacturing process on the work-piece quality.