Production Planning

The continuously growing cost pressure, individual production orders as well as decreasing innovation cycles are only a few characteristics of the vital structural change that the production industry has been confronted with during the past years. In order to stand out against the competitors and to gain an advantage in competition, an enterprise has to have the ability to adjust to the dynamic demands of the internal and external environment. A contribution to that is a flexible control system for the material flow. This article presents a heuristic based algorithm for the hot rolling production scheduling problem of a steel manufacturer.

„Gentelligence“ is a neologism and describes the property of parts to save, store and process data (intelligence) and further to pass information on to following generations of parts (genetic). Unlike existing technologies the gentelligent technology is able to store information without the physical separation of part and information. The present article highlights the potentials of gentelligent parts in assembly control and factory structuring.

Industrial customers are increasingly expecting to be provided with integrated solutions that in addition to a decent physical product comprise diverse services as well. Such solutions, called product-service systems (PSS), have to fulfil both customer individual targets and manufacturer targets. Due to this, manufacturer have to define key figures, which allow to choose the specific configuration of PSS and to measure the performance while it is used. This paper presents an approach for generating key figures for selecting PSS and controlling their performance.

Due to the increasing globalization of commodity flow a growth of mass good transportation is perceptible. Therefore automatic unloading of goods and their automatic transfer to logistic systems is one of the technical challenges. Opportunities arising from automatic goods unloading are explored in [1]. A system for unloading cubic goods automatically was developed and its introduction to market started last year. Changing environments and various operational areas are the motivation for research on a cognitive system for unloading goods. Hence, a concept for a cognitive system for unloading containers is introduced in this article. The components for such a system are image processing, robot control handling system and kinematics. For each of these components cognitive methods and technologies are proposed to be integrated in an overall system.

Flexible work times are a new opportunity to enhance the competitiveness of producing companies. To exploit this opportunity it must be considered during production planning and control. Available PPC and ERP systems do not sufficiently support the matching of required staff capacity and available (and paid) capacity. In this contribution we present the support of this matching process by the software OOPUS WEB.

In development projects, a delay in connection with budget overruns is often the consequence of unrealistic scheduling. A simulation based approach for modeling development projects has been developed to support the project planner and will be presented in this paper. This novel approach allows the modeling and simulation of the project-specific structural organization and the process organization as well as the typical non-deterministic project behavior. Therefore, a realistic scheduling and resource allocation of complex development projects can be achieved. The application of the approach in projects of our industrial partners in the chemical industry has shown the suitability of the developed tools.

Production Ramp-Ups are crucial for an industrial companies´ success. Business processes have to be controlled throughout the entire Production Network, what could be ensured by the use of modern workflow-based control methods. So far it is still questionable what should be the workflow’s goal. Looking at a ramp-up along the supply chain the process consists of a large number of local ramp-ups. For this a prognosis system will be introduced which allows an educated guess on the development of the number of pieces during the ramp-up. The prognosis is founded on a knowledge-based approach and does rely on multivariate data analysis. This will lead to a ramp-up forecast which could offer strategic aims into workflow-based network control tools.

The environment of industrial enterprises is characterised by an increasing degree of complexity, dynamics, and uncertainty. To cope with the rising demands, companies have to produce unique high-quality products in a cost-effective and timely manner. In contrast, the current proceeding for product generation can be characterized by a wide variety of time- and cost-consuming coordination efforts by usage of physical prototypes. Non-continuous process chains are additionally decelerated by island-like software tools. Promising approaches to handle the challenges facing industrial enterprises are subsumed by the term Digital Manufacturing, which comprises the planning, integration and operation of product- and production-related processes in industrial enterprises by means of information technology (IT). In this paper, we highlight three promising areas of Digital Manufacturing, the support in product development by bridging the gap between product and production engineering, the ...

The strategically appropriate dimensioning of inventory in the process chain is of utmost importance for companies. In this context inventory is utilized to counterbalance variations of the behaviour of customers as well as delivery date or quantity deviations caused by suppliers. It is a huge challenge to dimension the inventory as to realize a high level of security but also low stocks. This article demonstrates the methodical approach, the outcome of the Logistic Stock Analysis, and the validation of planning methods showcased for a project at the electronic factory of Siemens, Amberg.

This article points out the basic concept of „One-Piece-Flow” in the context of facility planning in manufacturing and shows examples of its successful application in assembly. The authors present configuration variants of this concept and they show the important design parameters with their effects on the system performance. While in the 80’s the principle of flow production was used only for large scale production and mass production, there is a new understanding today: the flow principle is also usable with advantages for medium quantity production, especially for assembly operations carried out by manual and by automatic work stations as well.