Adaptability

Companies nowadays face a plethora of challenges such as ever increasing customer requirements, globally distributes production networks or changing product life cycles. In order to react appropriately to these turbulences, production systems can be designed changeable. Today’s solutions often do not suffice. In particular, the needed time and the necessary extent of change are identified only intuitively. In this paper is presented a control-loop-based synchronization approach, which allows carrying out the change in the right quantity at the right time. An application example will further the theoretical bases.

Changes on the product and manufacturing side resulting from intensifying global competition have put pressure on companies to alter their strategy, organization and production. Especially the ability to quickly adapt production equipment has become a crucial factor which can provide great competitive advantage. Current research work of the Institute for Manufacturing Automation and Production Systems (FAPS) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg focuses on material-flow and production systems that are both self-organizational and self-learning. In this context, concepts have been developed for cost-effective restructuring measures during the operating phase which make a rapid response to dynamic changes and disturbances possible.

Digital Engineering is becoming more important due to its potentials in cost reduction as well as a unique instrument to control complex products and processes. Nowadays it is used in the industry to cope with more and more individual products accompanied by efficiency requirements on the production processes. The proceeding technical evolution makes it possible to participate in the domain of services from digital engineering. In this article we address challenges for linking process execution and planning. A logistic example illustrates the fusion of real and virtual world.

To compete in the global environment companies in high wage countries have to separate themselves from competitors from low wage countries by offering customer specific products and services. Due to the rising complexity of these products the steering of the corresponding production systems is getting more and more resource consuming. One way to handle this aspect is developed within the Excellence Cluster “Integrative production technology for High-wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University. Objective is the set up of production systems that are able to produce customer specific products at mass production costs.

So-called chaotic storages get increasingly important in commercial use. Their high dynamics and resulting uncertainty about storage levels result in high requirements on logistic processes. The project presented in this paper combines methods to meet these requirements by the use of an autonomous stocktaking robot. It uses approaches from the field of cognitive inspired Artificial Intelligence, enabling the robot to act purposefully in an unknown environment. Even if the environment is constantly changing, the robot is able to acquire robust information about the current state of e.g., storage areas, their position and goods stored in them. The information gathered is of coarse granularity but is still be a valuable basis for the analysis and optimisation of intra-logistic pro-cesses.

The cooperation between BLG LOGISTICS GROUP and the UNIVERSITY of BREMEN by the topic self-motoring in logistics exists since the composition of the collaborative research centre 637 “autonomous cooperating logistic processes - a paradigm shift and its limitations”. This research centre was founded by the “Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)” in 2004. Since then the BLG provides the research case studies and real data from the industry. This builds the basis of the research analysis in the form of autonomous cooperating processes and simulation studies and allows the verification and evaluation of the complied work results. On the other hand are the results of the collaborative research centre 637 case studies very important for the development of the processes at the BLG. This article presents the contemporary issue of autonomous control, the insight of projects between BLG and Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH (BIBA) and moreover a future scenario of ...

There is hardly a company that would not claim to be very flexible. Being flexible has become essential in today’s business world. It is a common misconception to consider high flexibility as the ability to compensate for weaknesses in processes or their design. On the other hand it is associated with the readiness or acceptance of the staff to cushion surges in needed capacity without additional expenses being incurred whatever induced the fluctuations. In times of market depression as we see today the narrow limits become blatantly apparent in the light of the current redundancy trend. If flexibility to such an extent is an important characteristic of manufacturers how and where can we see it? Proper process design which orients itself by the principles of simplicity and clarity is the core of highly flexible manufacturing systems. In conclusion by examining manufacturing processes of a low volume production the necessary prerequisites, the potential gains as well as limitations to ...

Enterprises face a plethora of outside influences. Examples include shortening product life cycles, rising cost pressure or increasing number of variants. In order to make arrangements for their factories to remain future-robust, many companies strive for a transformable factory. In order to fully use the change-potential installed, a methodology that allows integrating an employee-oriented view, is indispensable. This contribution presents an approach which renders possible the coordination of employee skills and factory transformability.

The information and communication technology distinguish the modern mechanical and automotive engineering. This is described by the term mechatronics. The development progress of information and communication technologies open up further fascinating perspectives: mechatronic systems with inherent partial intelligence. The term Self-optimization characterizes this perspective. Self-optimizing systems are able to react on changing environmental conditions and to optimize their behaviour autonomously. This contribution presents the paradigm of Self-optimization. The potential of Self-optimization is explained by two examples from the system RailCab.

The industrial production hast o react on internal and external turbulences. The transformability of the production is especially important in the field of the multi-variant series production. Transformability in factories is reached by using a fast operating and reacting planning which includes classic methods of the structured factory planning as well as modern digital tools. Such a planning is reached on a shared database and transfers results of former planning’s as well as simulations. So the planning is done in shorter time and has a higher quality. To be able to realize the planning the real factory must be reconfigurable to get an adaptive production. The learning factory at the IFF was founded to provide the missing knowledge about the transformability of enterprise structures to industry