Design

The Circular Economy (CE) is a form of economy that extends the use of products and resources by developing the linear supply chain (SC) to a circular SC. However, additional input factors are required for remanufacturing and recycling. Furthermore, these processes generate additional environmental impacts. It is questionable whether the circulation of products is only worthwhile from an economic point of view or whether it also brings environmental advantages. An approach that relates the economic impact of a product to its environmental impact is the Green Productivity Index (GPI). In the following, this index is developed for CE. Furthermore, this article examines how digitalization can positively affect the Green Productivity (GP) of CE. (Only in German)

The use of industrial robots in additive manufacturing has been increasing in recent years. Particularly due to the voluminous installation space and the great flexibility, they are predestined for the production of large-volume, individualised components. The multi-axis movement options of the print head attached to the end effector in conjunction with a swivel-tilt unit of the build platform mean that support structures can be dispensed with, which represents a major economic advantage.

Climate neutrality and digitisation are two future-relevant and interlinked topics that are gaining in importance for manufacturing companies. However, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), it is often difficult to get an overview of the concepts and practical measures in these fields. This article presents a maturity model that offers companies practical assistance in combining the goals of climate neutrality and digitisation and in identifying suitable (digitisation) measures for the company to support the transformation towards climate-neutral production. (Only in German)

Additive manufacturing is an increasingly important manufacturing technology with huge economical potential. However, its popularity is accompanied by high material and time losses, as defects are often detected at a very late stage. One solution for a more sustainable production is the automated detection of manufacturing defects using artificial intelligence. This article describes the digitization of the defect detection process in additive manufacturing using a system based on a neural network. In addition to the steps for automated defect detection, system performance is also discussed.

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)