Manufacturing Systems

production management is crucial to reduce time-to-market. Regarding ever-changing dynamic requirements that production systems have to meet there is a need of cooperative development and planning models, methods and tools. By that transparency in process organizations can be achieved as well as the availability of resources and competencies can be verified. The article de-scribes a resource-oriented collaborative engineering model to allow short and long term (re-)planning of production systems.

The requirements to enterprises in-creased and became more complex over the last years. This is caused by changing market demands - chief the change to customer orientation - and the resulting necessary changes. For these reasons the research on the area of value adding in networks grew in their significance. This paper presents an operating model for non-hierarchical production networks between small and medium enterprises and -units developed by the Chemnitz University of Technology. The selection of the necessary network participants is the central task of this model.

While the number of custom specific products is increasing the order size often diminishes. This problem leads to difficulties in managing demand changes, promising accurate dates and ensuring optimal equipment utilisation. A real-time information gap exists in the heart of most manufacturing enterprises, since there is a lack of visibility & predictability. Based on modern MES with maximum equipment integration, the use of automatic process control and optimization enables SME to be more competitive, efficient and customer-friendly.