Design

The impact of rapid technological change in a competitive global market is reaching small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) at an increasing rate; digitalization increases the interconnectedness among manufacturers, products and customers. Within this context, SME need to improve both their business processes and their technological capabilities in order to achieve internal and external sustainability goals, to be successful in the marketplace and to meet customer needs. This article discusses the opportunities of digitalization to improve sustainability by presenting two use cases from SME.

The manufacturing of products ties up energy as well as material resources. The awareness of consumers and producers as well as legislative activities to achieve a sustainable use of available resources are developing much too slowly. In this paper, a local remanufacturing approach is presented, which makes it possible to reduce resource consumption, to promote local enterprises and to offer efficient solutions for the regional reuse of goods.

In the production and operation of complex, one- of-a-kind products, disruptions inevitably occur. In practice, there are often deficits in terms of transparency and information flow when it comes to disruption management. Digital assistance systems facilitate disruption documentation: they increase the quality of information by locating it in the CAD model and in the overall product plan, thus accelerating targeted fault elimination. A generic data model makes it possible to use digital assistance systems for different products, trades and processes and in different product life phases. (Only in German)

Digitization and sustainable development are playing an important role in many areas, especially in production, although it is still unclear how they influence each other. First studies already addressed the question of how digitization can impact sustainability. It became clear that an evaluation method with indicators from all sustainability perspectives is needed. In this article, we will present a model-based evaluation method especially for ecological and economic sustainability, taking digital textile printing as an example. (Only in German)

Abrasive blasting is often used to clean work pieces. During the process an abrasive medium is propelled with compressed air toward a given surface. Common abrasives are sand, glass beads, steel or corundum. For safety reasons the blasting process is carried out in closed blast cabinets or rooms. Abrasives and cut off material are filling the air so that the visibility is limited. Quality assurance and safety monitoring of workers in blast rooms are therefore difficult which is essential e. g. in atomic power plant demolition. This article describes the development and test of a camera to improve this situation. Compressed air flows through the camera housing to keep particles away from the lens. The air flow was optimized by computational fluid dynamics. A prototype was made by 3D printing and tested in an blast cabinet.

Procurement has the task to supply an organization with required but not self-produced goods. The goods vs. payment exchange with suppliers is laid down in contracts. “Electronic contracts" or “Smart Contracts” represent the logic digitally and thus enhance transparency. This can still evolve. In the future, improved algorithms and artificial intelligence will not only be able to administer contracts, but also to design them. This article presents the status quo of "Smart Contracting", places it in the "Legal Tech" topic and shows how artificial intelligence could be used in procurement.

Optimisation is an essential task in many situations. The class of evolutionary algorithms is a population-based, heuristic technique for optimisation. They allow the optimisation of multi-modal problems even with distorted search spaces. They can propose several solutions instead of just one. An important aspect of evolutionary algorithms is encoding search space candidates. In the optimisation of processes, this is a non-trivial task. This article describes a successfully tested encoding.