Production Planning

Production companies are faced with an increasingly turbulent business environment, which demands very high production volumes and delivery date flexibility. If a decoupling by storage stages is not possible or undesirable from a logistical point of view, load scattering effects the production processes. This expresses itself in the form of heavy load scattering. What kinds of quantification of the load scattering exist and how these have been further developed are subject of the following article.

The efficient performance of service tasks on high-value capital goods like maintenance, repair and overhaul of aircrafts and railway vehicles is influenced by a turbulent environment. In this context, excellent production logistics in maintenance shops can be a way out to cope with this turbulence. This contribution describes a bottom-up approach which is the basis for improving the logistical processes by dimensioning material flow-oriented buffer stocks.

Despite increasing networking and electronic data interchange for many companies future demand curves are unstable. Resulting from demand fluctuations and deviations from planned processes, high requirements exist for production planning and control. The necessary flexibility to respond to such variations can be created by supply chain event management (SCEM). Based on the example of an automotive supplier process chain SCEM is defined and then implemented in an Advanced Planning and Scheduling System.

Both rural and urban regions have their specific advantages for companies. In practice, the central question is, how the structure of areas can be distinguished and under which conditions companies should settle in the city, in the country or in intermediate regions. In a study, companies were surveyed about their location in the metropolitan area Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg.

Volatility in market demand leads to temporary over- and under utilization of productive assets. Heijunka aims at de-coupling the production system from market volatility. The production program is spread as even as possible over time. This achieves high asset utilization, short lead times, and low inventories. There are validated Heijunka methods for the manufacturing industry, but for the process industry this remains a research gap. This article describes the development of a Heijunka model for the process industry in order to close that gap.

In today’s production systems the functions of production planning and control (PPC) have a significant impact on an efficient performance of production processes. The decisive interface between the prognosis based planning and its operative realization can be seen in the exchange of plan data and production feedback data. It is to be expected that developments in the context of Industrie 4.0 lead to an increase in data quality and actuality. Based on these improvements improved production planning results can be achieved. In the present paper the main functions of production planning will be discussed in detail and their development potential with regard to Industrie 4.0 will be pointed out.

Nowadays, a well-designed capacity supply is essential for a company’s competitiveness. In this situation, a flexible and efficient capacity control is among the most important measures. In this paper, we presented the potential of reconfigurable machine tools. Based on this, we described the concept of the throughput time harmonizing capacity control. Moreover, we evaluated the theoretical potential of this capacity control approach in a simulation experiment. In further steps, we will analyze the total potential in different simulation studies.

Regarding the concept „Industry 4.0“ some analogies to Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) can be detected. Industry 4.0 is using technical progress in manufacturing as well as in IT while in the CIM frameworks the interdependencies between the business management and the engineering issues are analyzed more in-depth. When designing general or industry-specific Industry 4.0 solutions it is worthwhile to consider insights and experience collected with former CIM projects.

Nowadays, the production of many goods takes place in distributed facilities within supply chains. The production planning of single facilities is based on due dates for delivery of raw materials or intermediate products that were agreed with supply chain partners. Thus, for an efficient overall system it is of major importance that these due dates are fulfilled. However, production systems are usually subjected to disruptions that put the execution of a given schedule at risk. This paper presents a method for the signal-based detection of faults in production systems. In addition to the fault detection, a heuristic method is employed that mitigates the disruptions and leads to a reliable production.

Ensuring healthy, safe and competitive work is a major challenge in industrial production particularly regarding the demographic change in Germany. Especially work systems with a high amount of manual tasks require appropriate solutions. The article discusses the potential of hybrid human-robot work systems in manufacturing focusing assembly tasks.