Manufacturing Systems

Nowadays, companies are facing a rapidly changing environment. New products have to be integrated into established manufacturing processes at ever shorter intervals. To assure competitiveness the design of changeable production systems gains more and more importance. Therefore, a control loop of changeability has been developed within the research project “change-supporting process architectures”. The control loop empowers companies to identify urgent changeability needs with an evaluation method and helps them to design and use change-supporting process architectures with economical solutions. The presented article focuses on the methodology for the evaluation of changeability.

Due to the concentration of core competences and the utilisation of international location advantages successful German production companies face a situation with globally dispersed sites in global value added networks. The ongoing globalisation, which includes the integration of external sites, suppliers and partners, leads to complex interactions within networks. However, these interactions are not or are simply partially known and not predictable so far. Being able to control dramatic dynamics in the behaviour of global value added networks, German production companies will be positively affected by globalisation in the future. Therefore, changeable global value added networks which can be quickly adjusted to dynamics become crucial. The paper on hand describes an approach for the planning and optimization of adaptable global value added networks. Background is the approach of the research project “planning and optimization of changeable global value added networks” (POWer.net) ...

Production systems require a continuous development to contribute to the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry. Therefore, the audit of production systems enables the determination of the current maturity level of production. This allows for the identification of deficits and the definition of starting points for a sustainable optimization of the production. This article focuses on the development of a maturity level based self-assessment concept for the evaluation of the sustainability of production systems.

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.

Shoe manufacturing provides employment to a large number of European citizens. Large parts of the manufacturing process are still dominated by manual work. Robotic solutions to automate and optimize the production can ensure that European companies, in particular manufacturers of high-quality, high-price fashion shoes, retain their competitive edge on the global markets. There are many sectors of industry, in particular industrial production, that have a strong need for practical, flexible, and human-like manipulation and gripping. This is true in particular for SMEs characterized by fast changing product-cycles and the need for robots that can be integrated in manual product lines. In general, all industrial sectors with a high percentage of manual labour, a large number of product variants, and non-standardized or delicate products do need robots that exhibit a general flexibility and the capacity for human-like manipulation. Shoe manufacturing is an example for an industrial sector ...

Already today intelligent functions based on microsystems technologies can be found in many applications of everybody’s daily life. Mobile phones are called smart phones. They are equipped with digital cameras, music players, game consoles and PDA’s. Cars are getting more and more intelligent due to self controlled operation and adaptive safety systems. Japan, USA and Europe belong to the first research and de-velopment sites worldwide. Key factors for successful products will be system integration, miniaturisation and last but not least transdisciplinary technology approaches. Thereby the gap has to be bridged between the nanometer and micrometer scale of the components and the customer’s macro world. Smart Systems technologies and their integration will therefore have a significant impact on the competitiveness of entire sectors as aeronautics, automotives, security, logistics, medical technology and process engineering.

A huge variety of micro-sized sensors and actuators are created using methods of Micro Systems Technology (MST). The limitation of this technology is the use of stacked layers so that no real 3D-structures can be created. This barrier can be overcome by combining MST-processes with subsequent forming-processes to transform the flat structures into 3D objects. This is demonstrated with the forming of a planar coil arrangement into a cylindrical micro motor.

Micro rotary swaging is introduced as micro forming process for homogenous and compound parts. Application fields are seen within surgery, mechatronics, micro drives etc. The specific process limits are addressed. Demonstrator parts are shown to give an impression of the process capabilities. These are a combined laser melt/plunge swaged ball geometry and joined parts of different materials. The use of micro rotary swaging offers mostly the same advantages that are known from the macro world. Keywords:

Micro technological areas such as micro system or medical technology generate an increasing demand for micro parts. Besides high precision manufacturing processes for parts with a size of a few micrometers to millimetres, their production and assembly needs suitable handling technologies. This paper addresses these handling technologies and describes the principles and boundaries for gripping, conveyance, separation and sorting of micro objects.

Design and production of micro-mechanical assemblies is characterized by complex challenges. The small dimensions of the components are close to physical limits of micro manufacturing processes. Shape deviations cannot be avoided. They affect the interaction of single components and may even cause malfunction. At IPEK - Institute of Product Engineering Karlsruhe, a quality management strategy is developed that allows identifying the impact of shape deviations on the functional interaction of micro gears. Shape deviations can be detected and analyzed in order to find matching gears without the risk of malfunction.