Safety

In the last few years, the private sector and international organizations have propagated numerous standards and norms, which prescribe some strict measures to protect supply chains. Security in the supply chain can be significantly increased with only a few principles. Against the backdrop of the many already existing initiatives, we discuss whether and how these could contribute to the supply chain security of companies. We aim at developing practitioner recommendations, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises without own security routines. These recommendations may serve as a guide and help to establish a management system for supply chain security.

In recent years some of the characteristics of robots designed for home or service robotics have been introduced in the industrial sector, enabling the collaboration and the sharing of common workspaces between human and robots. This article reviews some of the commercially available new generation robots, the enabling technologies being developed at DFKI Robotics Innovation Center over the last years, as well as the current developments within the European project FourByThree.

The work environment of the future will be characterized by networked cooperating objects. Properties of cyber-physical systems (CPS) cover collection, storage, intelligent processing and communication of data. As a result, new possibilities regarding interaction and collaboration arise. This paper focuses on the technical and organizational challenges of a robust safety and protection system, which is suitable for a human-robot-collaboration scenario. Known requirements for both an integrated safety concept of human-robot-collaboration and the functional safety of machines and electronic systems are identified and a reference architecture is developed for a semi-automatic assembly process.

Advancements in the automation of technical systems enable the simultaneous accomplishment of multiple complex functions. Through further integration of information and communication technologies, systems will be able to communicate among each other and autonomously adapt their behaviour to changes in the environment. For the realisation of logistic functions, autonomous robots are promising systems. For the development and prototypal testing of such robots the automobile terminal was chosen due to its specific attributes and challenges. This article introduces an approach for the combination of security services and continuous inventory by means of autonomous and cooperating robots. To enhance the efficiency of automobile terminals, innovative information and communication technologies are implemented and robust autonomous robots developed.

Management of security nowadays is a central task of supply chain management. This contribtion analyses and characterises different dimensions of supply chain security and develops a multi-stage concept to create a comprehensive proactive security management.

Communities of Practice are an important instrument of knowledge management, as they allow transferring expertise to remote business problems. Focussing on community facilitation and IT, this article assembles necessary requirements for community software and proposes a better support of social processes of knowledge work.