Autor: Marco Lewandowski

Wind energy has become an established technology for the generation of electricity from renewable energies. However, suitable sites for the installation of onshore wind turbines are limited or often already developed. Consequently, offshore wind energy will play a key role in the future of renewable energy production. Especially in implementing the turnaround of energy policy. The installation of offshore wind farms is comparatively complex and expensive due to the harsh weather conditions and the limited availability of resources. Therefore, new concepts for the construction of offshore wind parks have to be developed and evaluated. However, classical planning tools reach their limits due to such complex problems. This gap can be closed by means of a process simulation.

Efficient operation and maintenance (O&M) processes are important success factors to reduce the operating costs in the operation phase of industrial assets. Therefore, companies use different maintenance strategies that are well known from literature. Due to uncertainties in occurrence of faults and the duration of process fulfilment, strategies even supported by new technologies do often not fit to the specific real-world challenges. The focus of this paper is to discuss a new concept where operation data analysis is used to support decisions for logistics maintenance processes.

The number of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in industrial environments is growing based on the effort of projects like Industrie 4.0. CPS offer the potential to improve processes in modern value networks. By improving processes, especially jobs with no demand for qualified workers can be dispensed. Another effect are jobs being standardised, that they become very monotonous for the workers. For providing satisfying jobs especially for low qualified workers in future working environments some opportunities CPS offer were presented. First opportunities consumer devices offer were presented, second concepts for user-friendly human machine interfaces were illustrated.

The KWS SAAT AG have implemented and automatic identification system (Auto-ID) for corn. The main reasons for this were the logistic challenges and legal requirements concerning the traceability of seeds. With this system, the aim is to increase the efficiency of logistic processes in the supply chain. Before its implementation, a research project was conducted, in which the requirements that must be met by the Auto-ID system in this specific environment were examined.

The acquisition of technical data throughout the life of a product is of enormous importance in many industrial areas. For example, the maintenance processes can be designed to be more efficient and derived findings from the operational phase can be used for the development of new generations of products. Mobile systems that support the management of complex technical systems allow greater attention to the operational phases of the lifetime utilizing familiar concepts, such as product lifecycle management (PLM). The requirements and challenges of mobile systems are shown and compared with current trends and concepts.

Throughout the whole lifecycle, maintenance activities generally have to be fulfilled regarding technical systems. In logistics networks the creation of value at the nodes by means of rapid turnover is important, so that the availability of the production factor “machine” is essential. The increase in efficiency of support processes encompasses among others the maintenance of machines and installations. Within the paper, a procedure model with case study is presented, which illustrates the change-over to a condition-based maintenance strategy in the seaport surrounding.

In this paper we show an integrative solution to freight traffic reduction. Beside telematic systems we also regard software for planning and control of swap bodies in the area of courier express and parcel provider. The objective is to design a decision support tool for transport planning to support users to solve their daily problems of tour planning. The software prototype introduced in this contribution was provided in the context of the BMWi promoted project Inwest and will be evaluated in field test in third quarter of 2009.