Open Access Articles

The future of shop floor management (SFM) lies in its digitization. The visualization of key performance indicators is already supported by various providers or set up by companies themselves to save time. But particularly valuable in SFM is the sustainable problem solving, which contains the knowledge of the employees in text. Therefore, approaches from Natural Language Processing (NLP) are applied to these text data to realize assistance functions. This article provides situation-specific implementation strategies.

Managers are still facing significant challenges in implementing Industry 4.0 technologies and many companies have not gone beyond their initial Industry 4.0 lighthouse project to date. In the midst of this ongoing transformation, the European Commission published a white paper in January 2021 dealing with the “Industry 5.0 concept”. This paper investigates the term “Industry 5.0” with regard to the contribution of the European Commission and illustrates the connection with current Industry 4.0 initiatives.

The complexity of manual activities in different areas of a company is increasing due to smaller batch sizes, higher product variants and shorter product life cycles. The balanced provision of information ensures shorter training times, higher acceptance among employees and can be used directly at the workplace. For system implementation, organizational factors must also be considered in accordance of a socio-technical system design.

The digital twin has moved into the focus of manufacturing companies and has been identified by Gartner as a key technology [1]. In the automotive industry, VW uses the digital twin in the cloud to plan, control and optimize production at all 122 locations in the future [2]. The digital twin is also the basis and an integral part of new, digital business models and the digitization of production companies. This article gives an overview of the current state of the art and describes a flexible reference model for planning and optimizing production systems based on the digital twin. The focus is on the one hand on the optimization of static layouts and material flows and on the other hand on the optimization of dynamic material flows and the temporal organization of processes.

The diffusion of networked, intelligent products and production goods within the framework of Industry 4.0 is not only changing production, but is also causing the emergence of new forms of value creation and new types of business models that offer products and services in an integrated manner. This trend is called hybrid value creation and aims to offer customers holistic and individual solutions. The development of such business models requires a multi-criterial feasibility study. This paper deals with the specifics of the feasibility study of hybrid value creation business models.

In lean management implementations, processes are improved and causes of problems are sustainably eliminated. However, in areas with a lot of data, such as logistics, root cause analysis on the shopfloor becomes confusing and complicated. Supporting application systems can help with analysis and shopfloor management. Using the example of supply logistics in the automotive industry, a simple digital solution is demonstrated that creates transparency, saves time and contributes to sustainable problem solving.

Digitalization is changing manufacturing substantially. The design of user interfaces in the digitalized production environment is of utmost importance. In this article, potential combinations of approaches to human-machine interaction are shown and examples of applications are presented. Multimodal user interfaces offer a high degree of immersion. As a result, approaches of (among others) VR-, gesture- and speech-based types of interaction are compared with the dialogue principles and their suitability in practice as work and learning support for employees is presented.

When selecting a new refrigerator, energy efficiency is a decisive selection criterion. However, in the strategic and tactical planning of value-added networks, this is not yet the case. The E²-Design-toolbox enables energy efficiency to be considered in the planning process of production and logistics networks, in addition to the classic performance and cost variables. The early integration allows to draw on the overall potential. This paper presents the underlying energy data, the optimization modules, and the user’s perspective.

Remanufacturing, previously characterized by manual and cost-intensive processes, is a critical step on the way to a resource-efficient circular economy. Industry and research agree that the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies is the key to the development of automated and economical remanufacturing systems. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper is dedicated to the analysis of promising Industry 4.0 approaches with a focus on the overall process as well as the sub-processes of disassembly and inspection. The results suggest that there is a need for additional knowledge, experience and research in the development and real demonstration of the approaches and their transferability to broader application fields.

Due to rising quality requirements in the metalworking industry, parts drying has been gaining significance, leading to the increasing importance of reducing the energy consumption of drying processes. Therefore, the LoTuS project investigates different approaches to increase drying efficiency. Along with alternative drying technologies, process digitization is employed to provide sufficient transparency for part-specific drying. Using sensor data, artificial intelligence is utilized for process monitoring. Peak demand is further reduced by implementing load management techniques.