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 ...
