Manufacturing Systems

Growing requirements concerning comfort, safety, functionality and design are leading to fundamental changes in car body manufacturing, where as the demands for lightweight construction are clearly playing a central role. The expanding use of lightweight materials, including innovative semi-finished products, continually increases the level of difficulty required in forming operations and this, in turn, is leading to the inevitable development of new technologies. Based on this, some of the most significant trends in car body manufacturing will be covered.

Lightweight construction is inevitable in transportation engineering for economical and ecological reasons. The lightweight construction potential of CFRP surpasses that of metallic materials for the specific strength, stiffness, possible energy absorption, damping, and swinging strength. Production procedures on the basis of injection molding procedure, textile techniques, and stitching techniques are presented and are combined to a fabrication technology. The target set by aeronautical industry is a weight reduction of 30 % and a cost reduction of 40 % compared to metallic lightweight structures. Composites will only be able to achieve general acceptance in the fields of railway, automotive, and mechanical engineering, if the implemented lightweight construction is made profitable by new production concepts.

Today, an efficient product ramp-up is a precondition of the success of a company. The ramp-up management provides the coordination and management of the ramp-up process. The Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and the company Schnitzer Anlauf- und Projektmanagement GmbH has developed a tool for analysing the product ramp-up process in order to achieve potentials for optimization. Ramp-up projects can be evaluated and best practices can be identified.

Facing shorter product life cycles and ever changing customer requirements, production ramp-up processes are becoming one of the most decisive factors to stay in the market. In contrast to the automotive industry, where large scale information systems (IS) and simulation tools allow the build up of digital factories, small and medium sized enterprises (SME) lack resources to satisfy the corresponding organisational and IS-specific requirements. The focus of the research project ELAN is to develop an overall approach to manage production ramp-up adapted to the needs of SME.

The ramp-up of a production system is a part of the product creation process. In a highly dynamic and complex sur-rounding, it is more then every other phase characterised by an immediate call for action. This challenge can be met by designing production systems in a way that they offer a maximum of flexibility and transparency. In this context, planning a robust ramp-up means designing production systems that are flexible enough to balance transient state working systems and that are easy to handle in order to achieve a steep learning curve. How this can concretely be implemented, which are the benefits of the actual planning methods and -tools for the production, and what a company has to do to tap the full potential is demonstrated at two examples from the automotive supply industry.

Currently the realisation of the Digital Factory as the strategic goal for the next five years has been identified by many manufacturing enterprises. To achieve an integrated system planning and operation, the work is aimed at a comprehensive computer-based modelling of all design characteristics, structures and processes of a factory. This article scrutinises the technique-centred process for the realisation of the Digital Factory, which is currently favoured due to pragmatic reasons, and presents - based on the models in the Digital Factory - a comprehensive integration concept. To ensure the users’ acceptance, a user-oriented process considering enterprise-organisational requirements is preferred.

Changeability has become a buzzword for operations management, especially in German literature. Management of changeability, in contrast, has not yet been considered in practice or in literature sufficiently. The article presents an actors oriented approach for the management of changeability that enables a better composition and maintenance of change potentials in operation sys-tems. Change potentials are the unused abilities and relationships of actors and build up the changeability of an operation system. The management of changeability has to take care of these potentials for using i hemin the change process.

For the area of die-and-mould-making industry multi-axis HSC-milling plays an important role for the applied process chains. Tool wear, which cannot be avoided, influences the quality of the produced dies and moulds and it is determined mainly by the geometrical and technological properties of a concrete process. The following paper describes a system, which allows to predict the tool wear state during a future process on the machine tool. This is achieved by incorporating a process simulation system combined with technological wear models.

Modern factories are heavily influenced by product technologies, processes, IT tools and by the behaviour of the markets. Therefore these factories have to change accordingly using new tools and technologies. As such, Augmented Reality (AR) is a new and promising technology to support different tasks within the factories. The large economic potential of the AR technology is verified through different applications and justifies the efforts for further hardware and software development.

The development of ergonomic sys-tems and products will become a key role in the future of technical engineering and although a marketing objective. The relevance of “ease of learning” and “ease of use” will grow and will have an influence on the economic factor. It is necessary to orientate the communication between man and machine to the needs of both communicationpartners, and not to force the Operator to adapt to the machine. The article shows the requirements of the development of ergonomic user-interfaces and how a service provider can properly support a manufacturer.