control

The concepts of public and private play a special role in connection with the digitalized society and thus with the ethical requirements that such a society places on cybersecurity. This is because the digitalization of society is shifting the boundaries between what can be described as public and private. Consequently, the relationship between freedom and surveillance is being put to the test. It is a question of (cyber-)ethics how far privacy should be restricted in favor of surveillance and security. (Only in German)

Planning and control are fundamental goals that firms pursue at considerable expense. Illustrative examples include ISO 9001, Six Sigma and ERP systems. The exploration of radical control reduction has been left to communities of loosely connected amateurs. The success of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has shown that production models with low levels of control can be competitive. Commercial applications of these models promise competitive advantages to those who overcome the challenges of surrendering control and finding matching business models. This article outlines opportunities and risks associated with this phenomenon.

Due to the increasing globalization of commodity flow a growth of mass good transportation is perceptible. Therefore automatic unloading of goods and their automatic transfer to logistic systems is one of the technical challenges. Opportunities arising from automatic goods unloading are explored in [1]. A system for unloading cubic goods automatically was developed and its introduction to market started last year. Changing environments and various operational areas are the motivation for research on a cognitive system for unloading goods. Hence, a concept for a cognitive system for unloading containers is introduced in this article. The components for such a system are image processing, robot control handling system and kinematics. For each of these components cognitive methods and technologies are proposed to be integrated in an overall system.

For the economic control of production ramp-up processes established instruments such as milestones exist. Also, there are several approaches to the planning and control of the factors time, costs, and quality. Those approaches, however, are not sufficient for the optimisation of production ramp-up. Therefore in this article the authors present three questions that have not been solved yet. These are the aggregation of the goals of the ramp-up by an integral controlling, the definition of the contribution to the shareholder value, and the coordination of the companies involved in corporate networks.

Due to shortening product life cycles and to the continuous enlargement of product ranges the ramp-up of production systems has become a significant criterion for innovation dynamics of producing companies. Besides the in-creasing technical complexity, a growing number of different parties are involved with different targets and interests. The result is a rising number of possible disturbances for the ramp-up process. In order to better control and shorten ramp-up projects, methods and tools have to be developed to manage the project along the complete value chain. The article gives an outlook on the ramp-up of the future by describing an approach that is the basis for a research project supported by the German ministry of research and education.