life cycle management

The challenge for the offshore wind industry is the transition form a “pioneer industry” to a mass-volume industry. Especially if the ambitious goal of the federal government to install offshore wind turbines with a total capacity of 6.5 gigawatts by 2020 in North and Baltic Sea is considered. For a reliable and economical generation of electricity, a development of the offshore wind turbines for the entire product life cycle is needed as well as the optimization of processes. At present a lot of data is recorded in the individual life cycle phases which contains valuable information for the optimization and further development of offshore wind turbines. Within this paper an approach for the merging information along the life cycle of offshore wind turbines aiming at product improvement will be presented.

The economic analysis of physical assets over the entire life cycle is essential in modern industry. Particularly, in investment decisions, not only the pure expenditure for the procurement is used. Life cycle costing considers the required investments of a production site’s life cycle as a whole. In order to reduce the life cycle costs it is necessary to identify, analyze and derive corresponding measures. In practice, the data tracking over several periods is challenging. The following paper shows how the new IT approach of cyber-physical systems can improve such data collection. Furthermore, it will be shown how this database supports future investment decisions as well as the selection of life cycle support services.

The need to continuously adapt production systems to changing market conditions has dramatically increased during the last years. In particular small and medium sized enterprises (SME) are faced with the challenge to develop lean production systems and often struggle to identify and apply appropriate production system design methods. This paper presents a concept that supports SME to identify suitable production system design principles and methods and to implement lean production systems with respect to strategy, product life cycle phases and external change drivers.

Today increasing amounts of electronic components can be found in various products. Although these components have short innovation cycles they are used in primary products with comparatively long life cycles. The manufacturer of the primary product needs to supply spare parts both during production and after the end thereof. To date the planning of post end of production spare parts supply has posed a complex problem.