Synchronisation

That the pace of a rowing boat depends on time conformity of the strokes is common knowledge. Who gets out of step loses performance and does need longer to finish. What applies to a rowing team can be transferred to industrial logistics processes. Synchronised material flows between the different supply chain echelons enable an increase in throughput combined with stable processes. This paper is based on research results on the topic of „Synchronised Logistics Processes“, which have been performed at Munich University of Applied Sciences in the last couple of years. Based on already successfully applied traffic dynamics models, the crucial link between synchronisation, productivity and stability of material flows has been investigated thoroughly.

Production and logistics networks are distinguished by a permanently growing complexity and are nowadays more than ever forced to adapt fast to dynamically changing markets. These and other factors make an enterprise-spreading production planning and control more difficult. A new, promising approach is to take advantage of synchronisation phenomena in such dynamical systems. The production of individual enterprises in the network has to be synchronised on the basis of technical and physical aspects in order to render the whole network more efficient and more productive.