Adaptability

Complexity will be characteristic for future economic and technological development. Highly integrated and customer-specific products, that are manufactured in short times and call for life-long services, pose demanding challenges for companies of all sizes. Life cycle orientation and product variety thus mean a new dimension of complexity for production management, knowledge engineering and general management. Consequently, in future it will not necessarily be the fastest, cheapest or technologically most advanced company, that will be most successful, but possibly the one that is able to cope with this growing complexity in the best way.

In 2020 production and logistics are faced by a changed periphery of manufacturing. New manufacturing technologies, machine concepts and groundbreaking manufacturing control will be the main fields of innovation in the range of production and logistics. Starting from a scenario of production in 2020 the following concept identifies the drivers of innovation for industrial engineering and in particular for production logistics, that reflect the increasing dynamics and complexity of the changing environment, and points out the resulting fields of innovation.

In current logistics systems, there is a trend towards more and more smaller and smaller transport positions (atomisation of load). This increases the complexity of planning and control. Therefore, there is a need for new concepts to be able to still have efficient logistics in the future. Such a new concept is the autonomous control where intelligence and decision autonomy are moved as far as possible from a central control instance towards the individual vehicles and goods. For this concept of autonomously controlled logistics components, a model is needed to represent the logistics processes and to enable the investigation and evaluation of solution approaches. Such a model has been developed in the CRC 637 “Autonomous Controlled Logistics Processes - A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations" [1] as a discrete-event simulation platform and is presented here with exemplary results of a control algorithm.

European companies which are producing on customers demand, have to face a highly turbulent competitive environment. The main challenges are short production cycles, high customer requirements, globalisation as well as competitors from developing countries. A solution to the resulting high dynamic and complexity are cooperative management approaches like supply chain management and the set up of specific flexibility potentials.

High dynamics and structural complexity in current and future logistic systems are complicating central planning and control. For enabling a more decentralised and autonomous control, communication between the elements of the logistical network are necessary for the provisioning of the information needed. This article details the modelling of the communication between the components. This modelling contains source and sink of the information as well as the amount of data, frequency of transmission, quality of service and the moment of transmission for a reasonable usage of the information. The technical feasibility with current and upcoming communication systems is evaluated under consideration of the model.

Production systems in multi-tier value networks are nowadays facing major challenges with regard to supply network operations planning. Many existing solutions neglect feedback mechanisms and operate under the assumption of isolated supply chains. However, even for intra-enterprise planning across production plants, hurdles hamper a successful business usage. As an innovative approach decentralized planning grounds on consensus-like agreements between equal partners - both intra- and inter-enterprise - through communicative, negotiation-like processes. Thus research activities aim at developing appropriate coordination mechanisms for decision making in tactical operations planning between independent supply chain partners for yielding consistent plans.

Transportation and sortation of bins and similar units in conveyor systems have reached a high level of automation. Nevertheless the combination of state-of-the-art technologies can breed innovative solutions for typical problems arising in planning and operation of such installations. The source of upcoming developments is an increasing distribution of control functionalities.

The development of new complex products is increasingly conducted cooperatively in distributed, heterogeneous organisations in a dynamic environment. To successfully accomplish a project, the coordination of project controlling is of vital importance. Each participant of the development network has individual controlling systems, which cover his information and management needs. For cross-project controlling however, the creation of interoperability between distributed systems is a precondition for the coordination of processes. The article describes a cross-project controlling approach, which fosters integration by semantic modelling.

The management of inter-organisational business processes is a crucial and necessary factor towards the economic success of an enterprise. Flexibility and manageability of processes are core requirements to interoperability. In the article, we discuss the two complementary paradigms of the service-oriented approach and of the process-oriented approach. We demonstrate how the combination of these two concepts can be used to realize flexible and manageable processes even in a cross-enterprise scenario. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to compose business processes in a flexible way without losing the instruments of an effective business process management.

Interoperability between ICT systems is becoming an increasingly important success factor in the cooperation of enterprises. Organisations have to exchange business information and must have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information. Only then can they rely on both the transaction of the information and the validity of its contents. This paper reports on the European INTEROP Network of Excellence concerned with interoperability research for networked enterprises applications and software, its goals, rationale and early results. In addition, an application of interoperability in a supply chain network of SMEs is presented and discussed.