production planning

In today’s production systems the functions of production planning and control (PPC) have a significant impact on an efficient performance of production processes. The decisive interface between the prognosis based planning and its operative realization can be seen in the exchange of plan data and production feedback data. It is to be expected that developments in the context of Industrie 4.0 lead to an increase in data quality and actuality. Based on these improvements improved production planning results can be achieved. In the present paper the main functions of production planning will be discussed in detail and their development potential with regard to Industrie 4.0 will be pointed out.

Lot sizing is a substantial factor of economic production. There are various lot sizing approaches considering the same cost factors in different ways. Their results are usually quite similar. A common weakness of all lot sizing approaches is the limited consideration of relevant cost factors. The costs which are neglected usually rise with increasing lot sizes. This leads to illusory exact results because too large lots are calculated generally. This paper compares functions and results of different lot sizing approaches and discusses neglected cost factors.

The European automotive industry can be characterized by its multi-variant products resulting in complex production planning problems. Often separate systems are used to plan personnel capacity and production programmes. Usually human-resource allocation planning is done very inefficiently and independently from actual capacity requirements. This causes imbalances in the form of idle workers or overloaded workstations. This paper describes an approach for the integration of human resource allocation and production planning into one common planning platform in order to utilise existing optimisation potential. It will further describe the impact of the solution on flexibility and mutability of assembly lines.

In turbulent and innovative markets it is important for any production enterprise to have a high level of robustness within a specific range of output quantities vis-à-vis any changes it will be affected by. In fact, it is necessary to provide a planning routine for the adaptability of production systems as early as during the planning stage. In this way it will be able to respond to unforeseeable developments. Due to the demographic development in particular, it is no longer appropriate to consider the staff structure after the configuration of the machinery equipment has been planned. It is much more important to design manufacturing systems to be productive during the whole usage phase of the production system without a change of the permanent staff. The aim is to enhance the planning task in such a way that the production system can be adapted technically and organisationally as well as in a personnel-oriented manner to a changing performance of an ageing workforce.

Changeability is the capability of an organization to establish changes with a lasting effect. The possibility to correctly plan and create changeability of an organization already in the phase of plan-ning is an essential factor to be taken into account when considering changeable logistics systems. For this reason there is a need for conceptual change of established planning methods. In the context of discrete-event simulation, as an established planning method, the modular design of simulation models may be a first step to include changeability into model-based analysis. Against this background, This article discusses possibilities to build modular simulation models and shows how this modular design can be used in practice.

The continuously growing cost pressure, individual production orders as well as decreasing innovation cycles are only a few characteristics of the vital structural change that the production industry has been confronted with during the past years. In order to stand out against the competitors and to gain an advantage in competition, an enterprise has to have the ability to adjust to the dynamic demands of the internal and external environment. A contribution to that is a flexible control system for the material flow. This article presents a heuristic based algorithm for the hot rolling production scheduling problem of a steel manufacturer.

The environment of industrial enterprises is characterised by an increasing degree of complexity, dynamics, and uncertainty. To cope with the rising demands, companies have to produce unique high-quality products in a cost-effective and timely manner. In contrast, the current proceeding for product generation can be characterized by a wide variety of time- and cost-consuming coordination efforts by usage of physical prototypes. Non-continuous process chains are additionally decelerated by island-like software tools. Promising approaches to handle the challenges facing industrial enterprises are subsumed by the term Digital Manufacturing, which comprises the planning, integration and operation of product- and production-related processes in industrial enterprises by means of information technology (IT). In this paper, we highlight three promising areas of Digital Manufacturing, the support in product development by bridging the gap between product and production engineering, the ...

The product change is a natural component of the development process and arises in the framework of a continuous improvement and refinement of planning inevitably. Ideally a constant information gain in the process of planning leads to a revision and an alteration of existing acceptance and concepts. A special case of the change is described by the Product Change Propagation. A local products change reproduces itself global and leads to a number of subsequent product changes, which can be measured heavily. In the complex planning surrounding the effect of a product change can be mostly not promptly recognised and will have complex correction loops as a consequence. This paper offers, aligned to the process organisation, a system-oriented approach for the early identification of planning inconsistencies by subsequent product changes.

The present article reports the results of a methodical approach to the implementation of the Digital Factory in the aircraft industry. At first the initial conditions are surveyed with regard to selected company departments. Subsequently an application concept for integrating computer aided tools in production planning processes is presented and assessed. Eventually, in order to achieve an optimal introduction of the Digital Factory, the main organisational challenges are debated.

The efficiency in manufacturing can be increased by using new local control methods in combination with situational working plans. New degrees of freedom and additional reaction possibilities are generated in manufacturing, if the resource allocation and the processing order of the working steps are not predetermined anymore. The following article describes a new planning chain, consisting of production planning, closed loop production control and process planning, that is able to make use of these degrees of freedom. New material flow requirements are pointed out.