Manufacturing Systems

Since the financial crisis, industrial companies need to deal with an increase of uncertainty and volatility. Therefore, the concept of agile production is discussed strongly as solution concept to react on this situation. Product design and its influences on an agile production is one important lever to increase agility. This article tries to focus on that topic and presents a Design-for-Agility approach.

Medium-term order planning for the serial production of multi-variant products such as automobiles enables an integrated planning of procurement, production and sales as well as robust and optimized plans. In addition, continuity between medium-term and short-term planning can be achieved through a medium-term order basis. This article presents a planning methodology for the generation of planned orders to create a medium-term order basis, the assignment of planned orders to plants in a production network, and the assignment of incoming customer orders to planned orders.

There is a variety of empirically validated methods for implementing pull-systems in the manufacturing industry, but pull-based replenishment for the process industry remains a research gap. This article describes the development of a model for implementing a pull-system for an intracompany production network in the process industry and its validation in a case company.

Workflowmanagementsystems promise significant improvements for the modification management. Unfortunately, there is a lack of potential for optimisation because of the process characteristics in plant engineering projects. To close the gap it is necessary to create further requirements for an agile modification management. This article shows the important requirments and an approach for implementation.

Assistance technologies are an approach to support skilled workers in their work processes that are currently changing under the influence of the 4th industrial revolution. They aim at reducing physical and psychological stress by processing the big amount of decision-relevant data in a way that it serves workers for their decision-making process. Work places need to be designed in a way that they encourage learning and competence development and that involves future users in this design process.

Maintenance activities require a high degree of problem solving capacity from the specialists in order to be able to successfully carry out troubleshooting tasks. The expertise of the specialists is based in particular on the successful use of knowledge in problem solving situations [2]. Assistance systems should therefore support the specialist in the learning or reflection process and offer the opportunity to use the experience gained from previous measures for the current problem solution. The present paper describes an approach to the development of assistance systems for learning.

Optical systems are a popular choice for quality inspection because they are not only contactless and precise but also comparably fast. Particularly in cases where a 100% quality inspection is required low measurement and evaluation time is of essential importance. With high production rates of several parts per second, manual inspection is not feasible anymore and the evaluation needs to be automatically carried out by algorithms. In this article we propose a fast method for anomaly detection in image data based on principal component analysis and filtering. The method shows competitive performance on a data set of challenging surface inspection.

The digitization is changing industrial production in Germany in a sustainable manner. Production facilities combined with information and communication technology are forming intelligent value-added networks. With the reference architecture model Industrie 4.0, the Plattform Industrie 4.0 presents a coordinate system that sorts all important aspects of Industrie 4.0 in three dimensions. The RAMI system provides orientation, but also shows further need for action on the way to a digitalized production. An essential requirement is a uniform interaction model. If machines, systems, sensors and products interact with one another, they must speak the same language. In the Working Group “Reference Architectures, Standards and Standardization” of the Plattform Industrie 4.0, experts from various fields are working on these communication standards and presented new results in November 2016.

The comprehensive digitalization of work environment constitutes major challenges in connection with new media and an extended human-computer interaction. In this context, service and maintenance proved to be an important field of application for this form of Industry 4.0. An adequate process execution and documentation has to be secured, even under challenging conditions, e.g. malfunctions on short notice, harsh working conditions or tight timeframes. These requirements as well as the increasing digitalization promote the application of Augmented Reality solutions in this area. With a focus on maintenance of wind energy turbines, this article describes the state of the art in relation to current solution approaches and development needs in connection with a process-oriented application of Augmented Reality. Therefore, current solutions that are already on the market are considered as well as results of the joint research project “AR Maintenance System”.

100 years ago the plastic era began with the first industrial production of plastic from petroleum. The polluting degradation of common plastic takes hundreds of years. Therefore, so-called bioplastic are becoming more popular in society. However, not every bioplastic is biodegradable or produced from renewable resources. This article focuses on the production of microbial produced polyesters with comparable properties to polyethylene, which is completely biodegradable in common habitats and can by synthesized from biogenic feedstocks.