Manufacturing Systems

Planning, design and continuous improvement of today’s complex corporate structures and technical systems require a sophisticated level of extensive know-ledge of technology, processes and IT. To apply planning and simulation tools effectively and efficiently engineers and plant operators have to rise to the challenge to use their knowledge in a goal-oriented way and to expand it within creative processes. Consequently, knowledge is more than ever a key productivity factor and an important component of corporate capital. Against this background, the article discusses possibilities for systematization and standardization in simulation studies and especially approaches to increase productivity in simulation studies by supplying assistance functions as well as systematic evaluation methodologies.

Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) is the overall integration of knowledge, rules and process operation in the engineering process. It helps implanting the interdisciplinary know-how in product- and process development. The resulting effects are mainly time- and cost-cutting, which can be assigned as relevant competitive advantages against competitors. The importance of this field of study for industries like the automotive, ship-building, process engineering, plant manufacturing and machine-building industry was the significant reason for starting this research. At the very beginning, the focus was on the identification of certain descriptors through analyzing almost 100 scientific articles, books and dissertations about KBE. On the one hand this approach gives a deeper look into the state of the art and on the other hand it provides the possibility of ordering these articles in a certain hierarchy of relevance. The frequencies of indications of the given descriptors within the ...

Handling complexity is one of the key topics of producing enterprises worldwide. It can be noted that enterprises are indeed able to coop with the complexity of single processes due to a function-oriented organisation, yet the same organisational paradigm leads to local objective systems that in many cases are contrary to the global goals of the enterprise. The same problem is reflected and supported by the enterprise’s IT systems. Thus, in this paper we present an approach to convert the inflexible function oriented operations into comprehensive processes by introducing special IT systems, so-called logistic assistance systems. To illustrate the approach we introduce the problem of integrated order sequencing and transport planning in the automotive industry and present a prototypical solution.

Internal and external influences of change plus the steady examination with continuous as well as discontinuous change constitute a great challenge for industrial companies to be mastered. The improvement of production systems towards variable and unpredictable requirements caused by a variety of company-specific impacts will be increasingly focused. In this article a concept will be introduced which helps to identify and analyze company-specific change factors systematically.

Processing of the production orders in sync with customer demand, on schedule, at short notice, with constant machine utilization, is the vision of many a plant manager. Besides machine and personnel productivity, stock volume is for this the clearest performance indicator. In large-scale production, this vision has quite successfully been approached through assembly lines with a continuous, pulled material flow and one-piece production. Especially in series and small series production with high variety, however, the same concepts are not applicable or not very successful. A sustainable way to approach the vision in such a setting is described in this paper based on the practical example of TRUMPF Grüsch AG.

Lot sizing is a substantial factor of economic production. There are various lot sizing approaches considering the same cost factors in different ways. Their results are usually quite similar. A common weakness of all lot sizing approaches is the limited consideration of relevant cost factors. The costs which are neglected usually rise with increasing lot sizes. This leads to illusory exact results because too large lots are calculated generally. This paper compares functions and results of different lot sizing approaches and discusses neglected cost factors.

In today’s business environment enterprises react to changing conditions with the implementation of Lean Production Systems (LPS). But changing conditions are not only effecting the production. The role of product development is becoming increasingly important to the overall business success. Many enterprises react by designing specific Lean Development concepts. As there are different approaches to design concepts, enterprises have to decide which approach to follow. This paper presents the approach, which takes LPS as the basis, considering the circumstances of the development process and transfers it to the development process to design a Lean Development concept. It is demonstrated how the transfer of the LPS-principles based on VDI 2870 would affect the development process.

In the field of automobile production, automation has been implemented since the nineteen-seventies. In logistics, however, robotics has only been used to automate logistics processes with low complexity. These include processes with a high repetition rate and a highly standardized goods portfolio. In cooperation with EASY-ROB, BIBA has developed a new strategy for an intuitive programming of robotics that might be used to fulfill rather complex tasks. The operator defines the process type and important parameters via a common tracking system. Based on this data, a simulation tool calculates the movement of the robot and executes a collision control. Finally, the simulation tool generates the corresponding machine code and the robot starts its process. The intuitive programming excels at a favorably cost-benefit ratio. A demonstrator, focusing on the unloading of pallets has been presented on the CeMAT 2011. After a very brief introduction, interested visitors were able to operate the ...

Sustainability in lean production systems arises when the relevant lean principles are addressed by preferably all stakeholders in the context of permanent improvement processes. For this purpose a skills development of all employees is necessary, even for managers, as they convey the CIP position by their people skills and set an example. If this succeeds, improvement processes will develop into a sustainable learning process, which in turn serves as a self-reinforcing factor for the further development of staff skills. An approach to skills development and to the corresponding leadership system for improvement processes is presented and supported by preliminary results of an empirical study.

Due to a difficult market situation represented by the world economic and related market crisis and a steady growth of model-variety the automotive industry is facing major challenges: short innovation cycles, increased complexity of production and cost pressures. To respond to these challenges advanced approaches for long-term planning of production systems have to be implemented. This paper presents approaches of plant design utilizing digital factory and shows applications of operations research (OR) for the planning of production systems. The application of OR methods holds significant potential not only for the network planning level but also for supporting strategic decisions on the production system level.