decision support

In the connected world, digital twins open up completely new possibilities: they virtually replicate physical systems, processes, or products. However, key challenges remain, including the collection of current product data. This issue of Industry 4.0 Science covers a wide range of topics, from the basic concept of the digital twin to its benefits in procurement and its use in supply chain management.

Based on known deficits, the article recommends measures for a successful realization of the concept Industry 4.0 on the levels “Business”, “Functional” and “Information” of the RAMI-4.0-Framework. The technical foundations to meet the expectations of Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing are in place; a correction of the named deficits in the near future seems realistic.

Systematic identification and comprehensible evaluation of process improvements are difficult to implement in current complex production systems. However, the ongoing digitalisation of production systems provides better opportunities to analyse and to identify energy improvement measurements and actual maintenance needs. To achieve these objectives an appropriate human-machine interface is necessary to present user-specific conditioned machine data within the scope of action of the desired user. Modern mobile devices provide a wide range of communication possibilities and computing power to setup a perfectly designed ergonomic human-machine interface.

The increasing threat of German industrial goods manufactures by product piracy and other types of unintentional know how transfer is all but accepted today. However, generally speaking, piracy management today is still rather reactive than preventive and in most parts the results of a more or less tactical planning approach. Strategic concerns such as the fundamental strategic fit of countermeasures and actual piracy situation have not yet been solved satisfactorily. Quality assurance in strategic decision making is a prerequisite for a successful strategy against product piracy. This article presents an approach to solve the issue based on the well-known quality function deployment (QFD) method.

State of the Art IT-solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM-solutions) offer no support for decision makers in the early phases of product engineering. Their focus is rather on the administration of design data. This article describes a concept for the advancement of PLM-solutions. Existing approaches in Business Information Management are being discussed and extended to allow their application in the PLM-context. Fundamental idea of the described concept is a role, task and process oriented guidance of decision makers. Finally the strategy of realisation is outlined and an outlook on major potentials of realisation is given.

Lean Production-Systems (LPS) are widespread especially among the big automobile producers. LPS are company-specific configured systems which optimally coordinate technical, personal, and organisational methods. The implementation and maintenance (of elements) of an LPS requires a certain effort, but provides also many benefits. The effort-benefit relation especially for small and medium-sized enterprises is often not known. This paper allows in this context an overview of how to make this relation transparent as to production factors and size of enterprise.

20 years have gone by since the first complex Revenue Management System DINAMO (Dynamic Allocation and Maintenance Optimizer) has been applied for an integrated price and capacity control. From then on Revenue Management has established itself as a planning- or rather as a decision-instrument for acceptance/rejection problems mainly within the service industry. Airlines, car rentals and hotels particularly use this instrument. Until today only a few authors have discussed the possibility to assign Revenue Management also to the industry [1 - 4].