Adaptability

The devastating economical crisis and the rise of economy in 2010 showed that companies nowadays act in a turbulent environment. Internal and external factors like customer demand change in a very dynamic way. The research and development project ProAktiW is funded by the BMBF. Results of the project will show that an increase of changeability induces the sustainable and economical production in Germany. This article shows first results of the recently started project.

This article deals with flexibility of production and distribution processes within global production networks. It introduces the concept of autonomous products, classifies different types of flexibility and develops according object models. The decision alternatives resulting from the increased flexibility are modelled as a mathematical function. Different decision methods are proposed for decision rendering and selecting between these alternatives. Exemplary applications in some scenarios are proposed.

Against the background of complex and volatile value chains the success factor quality is gaining increasingly in importance. Today, product quality and process quality as well as their continuous improvement are the basis for entrepreneurial success. Thus quality controlling becomes a central function in order to assure competitiveness of companies. New approaches are in demand in order to fulfil quality requirements along value chains and in order to link quality management systems with quality controlling. By an inter-divisional and company-wide implementation of Quality Gates these requirements can be met.

The Autonomous Logistic Engineering Methodology (ALEM), which is developed within the Collaborative Research Center 637, provides several tools for creating models of autonomously controlled logistic systems. To evaluate such models, the ALEM framework is extended to include a simulation component. As the ALEM Models cannot run directly within simulation software, they are transformed using principles of the Model Driven Architecture. To enable the transformation several open source tools can be applied. This article evaluates a selection of such tools with the aim of integrating them into ALEM.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...