Germany is known to have a very powerful and highly competitive industrial sector. In this context, the manufacturing sector accounts for around 50 % of German exports and is facing a variety of new challenges like an increasing international competitive pressure, more complex value adding networks and more volatile markets [1]. Constant innovation is going to be required and therefore flexible production systems are increasingly gaining in importance. This article discusses the results of a collaborative industry survey about flexible production systems, which have been conducted in the context of the European research project cPAS. On this basis, requirements and potential of an increasing horizontal integration between companies and production planning / runtime systems are discussed.
