Manufacturing Systems

Production is leaving Earth. As access to space becomes increasingly affordable and reliable, the idea of manufacturing in space is evolving from science fiction to a real industrial strategy. In this interview, Jan Wörner, who has headed not only the German Aerospace Center (DLR) but also the European Space Agency (ESA) for many years, talks about strategic opportunities and regulatory challenges.

Due to its weightlessness, space offers enormous opportunities for production. The unique conditions of microgravity, for example, can simplify the development of organs and tissues from the body's own stem cells, allowing therapies to be developed in a more targeted manner. Even though many independent initiatives are currently emerging to explore this and other potential applications, their success is not a foregone conclusion.

The blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021, caused by the accident involving the container ship Ever Given, clearly illustrates the need to design global supply chains in such a way that they can respond quickly to disruptions. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, conventional logistics processes that focus on efficiency, and supply chain management methods in particular, are increasingly reaching their limits. Resilience, achieved through a combination of robustness and agility, is essential to ensure responsiveness. This article analyzes how risk management information systems (RMIS) can increase resilience. The analysis covers data availability, data transparency, modeling and simulation of risk scenarios, and the development of appropriate emergency action plans. Despite existing challenges in designing IT infrastructure, the measures mentioned have the potential to increase resilience in logistics.

Digital twins connect physical and digital systems, furthering efficiency, enabling predictive maintenance, and allowing the production of more customized products. Despite these advantages, challenges such as high costs, data synchronization, and security risks hinder widespread adoption. This article explores the potential of digital twins and examines key barriers to integration and implementation, also considering some industrial applications including additive manufacturing as a relevant use case.

Due to the higher customization of products to customer groups and needs, body-in-white manufacturing industries are facing higher variant assembly at the later stages of the production line, thus increasing production costs per unit. Flexible production processes that involve flexible material flows, non-rigid manufacturing sequences, and the automatic reconfiguration of tools are regarded as the pillars of a resilient production system. This article presents a conceptual solution for flexible Body-in-White sheet metal production with autonomous collaborative robotic systems to make product costs affordable for a higher competitive advantage.

This study explores experience-based error management on the basis of 23 participating companies. This study aims to identify essential criteria for effective error management in production. For this purpose, a comprehensive questionnaire was created, featuring 77 questions across eight key topics, including error culture, documentation, root cause analysis and software-supported knowledge management. The following analysis highlights both positive and negative measures, providing specific recommendations to optimize experience-based error management.