Production Planning

The assembly and usage of offshore wind energy plants will increase during the next years. The German government updated the Renewable Energies Act in 2009 which pushes the offshore development ahead. One German offshore wind energy park has been assembled and put into operation so far. Transport, construction and assembly underlie strong influences like weather conditions on sea as well as material availability. The presented article shows these influences and a concept in which adaptive planning and control strategies are used to keep the overall process under control.

The regional and economical policies of the Chinese government in the past few decades have led to marked regional economic imbalances. In order to implement initiative in China successfully, a valid location planning is a great challenge for foreign logistics companies. They need different qualitative and quantitative criteria for location decision. In this article was showed an overview of the major logistics hubs in China and analyzed their characteristics and location quality from the perspective of the western logistics companies.

Fabrication and assembly processes - in which the manual work processes play an important role related to a high probability of errors and interruptions - can be planned with the production simulation, if the simulation approach is adapted to the robust planning method. This article shows for the example of shipbuilding, how the simulation user benefits from the scenario-based process model for the preparation and management of the simulation scenarios. Additionally a systematic evaluation method simplifies the interpretation of the simulation results in order to assess the robustness of the planning alternatives.

The future of the German manufacturing sector and its seminal industry sectors is a matter of the corporate research project between McKinsey & Company and the Department for production management, technology and machine tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt. An innovative approach on segmenting different types of production within the manufacturing sector offers a differentiated view on the German production structure. A comparison with other European industrial nations offers the classification of the German manufacturing sector within an international context. Based on a status-quo scenario and with corresponding improvement methods for the production it is possible to set up a future scenario for strengthening the production in Germany.

Today, the logistics performance especially of manufacturing companies is becoming a distinctive success factor in the marketplace. Perceiving this development Siemens’ Electronics Manufacturing plant in Amberg (EWA) implemented a comprehensive logistics KPI system supporting the controlling of production processes. The tools used, however, fall short of considering the interdependencies between different logistics KPIs. The article reports on a project conducted in cooperation between EWA and the Institute for Production Systems and Logistics of Leibniz University at Hannover. Presenting the project’s approach, conclusions and resulting experiences, the theoretical background as well as the fundamental impact production operating curves can offer for the competitiveness of a manufacturing company are outlined.

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.