robustness

The crises of recent years have highlighted the importance of robust business processes. Even if the concept of robustness is often not clearly defined in the context of entrepreneurial activity, it can certainly be defined on the basis of various factors such as agility, adaptability and resilience. A systematic analysis of robustness and its prerequisites in the corporate context is therefore highly relevant, especially in times characterized by uncertainty.

Whether it is the availability and costs of raw materials, energy and personnel or simply market and sales options, disruptions are increasingly influencing the business of manufacturing companies. In recent years, it has become clear that robustness, particularly in the face of a wide range of disruptions, cannot be countered by managing critical resources alone. From the authors' point of view, the design of robust corporate processes is part of the comprehensive approach. In this article, the importance of robust processes in the context of critically changing resources and infrastructures is demonstrated. (Only in German)

Companies sometimes miss opportunities to pursue long-term people-related targets despite short-term performance targets. There is a lack of a measurable variable that shows possibilities for the pursuit of person-related targets. This paper will therefore present an approach based on a simulation-based robustness analysis that makes it possible to integrate long-term targets into production planning. By identifying critical workplaces and determining the tolerable change in the planned personnel deployment, possibilities are shown for pursuing long-term people-related targets.

Global production networks connect partners with outstanding expertise, and make use of regional cost advantages for purchasing and production operations. This development leads to an increasing structural complexity of the networks, which is accompanied by a closer collaboration of dynamic logistics processes. Hence, the resulting dynamics of a large-scale production network is characterized by the dynamics of the individual logistics processes, the dynamics of the network structure and dynamics of the external processes that affect the production network. However, in practice a lack of adequate procedures for the analysis and design of these networks can be observed. The presented article addresses this need by introducing tools and methods for the approximation of large-scale production networks, analysis of their dynamics and the robust design of the network resources.

Digital watermarking has been developed for copyright protection and fighting piracy in the domain of digital media. Due to recent improvements regarding watermarking robustness against printing of images or analogue distribution of audio and video, also the protection of common, non-virtual goods has been enabled. Information can transparently be linked with the goods, providing a protective layer hard to forge or to remove. We discuss recent developments in the area of image watermarking and introduce an algorithm suitable for printing and scanning of packages. Additionally we show typical challenges and solutions for image watermarking caused by typical analogue transformations of marked content.

Planning and control of logistics processes is more and more determined by an increasing complexity of structure of logistics networks and dynamics. However, in many aspects methods and tools for a comprehensive analysis of large-scale logistics networks are missing. This set of problems is the object of investigation in the new research project ‘Stability, Robustness and Approximation of Dynamic Large-Scale Networks - Theory and Applications in Logistics Networks’ founded by Volkswagen Foundation. The project will be run in a dual way: Mathematicians from the university of Bremen und the university of Würzburg cooperate with researchers from the field of engineering of the university of Bremen.