Manufacturing Systems

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.

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.

In electric energy systems based on renewable generation plants supply and demand often do not occur in the same time. Consequently energy flexibilization is gaining importance in industrial environments, whereby decentralized automation offers opportunities. Compressed-air systems on industrial plants supply manufacturing equipment with compressed air, nitrogen and other technical gases, which partly can be obtained from air by deposition processes. Those systems consist of air compressors, gas separators, reservoirs and lines. With suitable dimensioning and by equipping with automation technology those product-service systems can be used for energy flexibilization purpose.

The increasing customization of products, which leads to higher numbers of product variants with smaller lot sizes, requires a high flexibility of manufacturing systems. These systems are subject to dynamic influences and need increasing effort for the generation of the production schedules and for the control of the processes. This paper presents an approach that addresses these challenges. First, scheduling is done by coupling an optimization heuristic with a simulation model to handle complex and stochastic manufacturing systems. Second, the simulation model is continuously adapted by real-time data from the shop floor. If, e.g., a machine goes down or a rush order appears, the simulation model and consequently the scheduling model is updated and the optimization heuristic adjusts an existing schedule or generates a new one. This approach uses real-time data provided by future cyber-physical systems to integrate scheduling and control and to manage the dynamics of highly flexible ...

Musculoskeletal disorders are responsible for about one quarter of all days of incapacity to work in Germany. In order to identify which types of strain lead to an increased risk of the emergence and aggravation of work-related musculoskeletal disorders in operational intra-logistics and to identify in which types of jobs this risk especially occurs, 30 people working in different companies were interviewed. It was discovered that almost all types of manual handling of loads (lifting, carrying, pulling and pushing), and both standing permanently as well as forced sitting are relevant.

Digital factory, simultaneous engineering and system interoperability are based on collaborative interdisciplinary working processes in an enterprise. According to a study of the workgoup industry 4.0 [1] the implementation of industry 4.0 leads to new collaborative and cooperative behaviour between employees. For academic teaching this implies, that in addition to technical, methodological and IT expertise, collaboration skills must be encouraged. The following article explains the use of physical models to teach collaboration skills by means of the example of factory planning. These models are currently realized or are already in use in teaching at the department for organization of production and factory planning of the University of Kassel.