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The urban population is growing and with it the need to meet the emerging challenges with sustainable solutions. The concept of the Physical Internet (PI) represents such an approach, which includes a complete supply chain perspective, but also a direct effect on the urban environment. At the same time, its implementation comes with requirements for the integration into the city district, which makes it necessary to adapt various urban characteristics. This article creates a generic design framework for this.

Volatility in market demand leads to temporary over- and under-utilization of production assets and stocks. Levelling (heijunka) as a lean method aims at de-coupling production 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 Product Wheel and its validation at a building material manufacturer in order to close that gap.

The food production process and raw material specific parameters significantly influence the quality of the final product. Furthermore, for products with several ingredients, complex parameter effects occur. This complexity causes the desire for a production control that considers these effects and orientates on final product quality. This article describes the state of the art and derives requirements form a case study in a delicatessen food production system. In summary, this paper presents a concept for production control with special consideration of the final product quality for the production of delicatessen salads.

The manufacturing share of laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) increases in industrial application, but still many process steps are manually operated. Additionally, it is not possible to achieve tight dimensional tolerances or low surface roughness. Hence, a process chain has to be set up to combine additive manufacturing (AM) with further machining technologies. To achieve a continuous workpiece flow as basis for further industrialization of L-PBF, the article presents a novel substrate system and its application on L-PBF machines and post-processing. The substrate system consists of a zero-point clamping system and a matrix-like interface of contact pins to be substantially connected to the workpiece within the L-PBF process.

Additive manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing, have reached a stage of performance for industrial application such as small series and spare parts. The adoption of additive manufacturing has so far mostly been investigated from the perspective of individual manufacturing firms. This paper focuses on the identification of overarching influence factors. In a category system, influence factors are analyzed from the perspectives of the supply and demand side, the supply chain actors and flows as well as sustainability, thus contributing to the adoption from a supply chain perspective.

The digital twin is well on the way to becoming an elementary part of the corporate world. Corporate leaders hope that these intelligent images of an increasingly dynamic corporate reality will significantly reduce complexity. Ideally, model-based analyses and (partially) automated decisions using methods of simulation technology and artificial intelligence based on optimized IoT data management can make their contribution to corporate agility. In addition to the definition of terms/concepts, the paper will discuss current challenges and present various examples of their application. Based on these ideas, a process model for the introduction of digital twins in terms of technology migration will be presented.

As the Ernst & Young (EY) Global Printing Report 2019 shows, the use of additive manufacturing has skyrocketed from 24 % in 2016 to 65 % in 2019 within the past three years. Furthermore, around every second company wants to produce end products generatively in the next three years. In order to achieve this, more and more companies are considering how they can use additive manufacturing processes not only for prototypes, but also for contract manufacturing through to mass production of series parts.

Additive Manufacturing (AM), also commonly called 3D-Printing, is very recent technology. Numerous innovations have improved their capabilities in the last few years. These improvements combined with ambitious promises made by 3D-Printing companies have led to some disregard of the physical and economical limitations of these technologies. As impressive as the opportunities especially in light weight construction may be, the technical, physical and economical restrictions have to be considered. This article focuses on the premises and restraints as well as the opportunities of AM-technology.

By integrating specific material properties through the manufacturing process Selective Laser Melting (SLM) into a topology optimization, the product engineer can be supported by simulation in the design process. For this purpose, a topology optimization method is being developed which takes the process-specific material properties of the SLM into account during the optimization process. This method is part of a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In this article, the influence of these specific material properties on the design is presented.

In this paper, the creation of strength and stiffness-adapted structural nodes using the numerical simulation method of topology optimization is presented. The resulting node is transferred into a robot path planning by means of CAD/CAM software and manufactured with wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) with the GMAW process using the welding filler material G4Si1.