Simulation

Simulation is an accepted method within modern engineering processes across different industrial domains. Especially automation engineers use modelling and simulation methods within various project phases to guarantee high quality products that are produced on high quality plants. The necessity of modern simulation technology rises due to the latest trends regarding the virtualization of production plants. This article describes the need for standards within the field of modelling and simulation of mechatronic factories and machines using a digital twin.

Wind energy has become an established technology for the generation of electricity from renewable energies. However, suitable sites for the installation of onshore wind turbines are limited or often already developed. Consequently, offshore wind energy will play a key role in the future of renewable energy production. Especially in implementing the turnaround of energy policy. The installation of offshore wind farms is comparatively complex and expensive due to the harsh weather conditions and the limited availability of resources. Therefore, new concepts for the construction of offshore wind parks have to be developed and evaluated. However, classical planning tools reach their limits due to such complex problems. This gap can be closed by means of a process simulation.

Industrial work 4.0 challenges workers due to ambiguity, self-organization, and interconnec-tedness. To qualify workers to successfully cope with these challenges, this article introduces the software-based situational learning factory that is completed like a flight simulator. By playing these so called serious games that simulate situations on the shop floor of varying complexity, employees gain experiential knowledge and improve their IT-skills.

The global community is currently experiencing many disasters requiring humanitarian aid not only for ethical reasons. This concerns natural disasters, but also man-made disasters such as war, terrorist attacks and nuclear disasters. Humanitarian aid is generally understood as a response to humanitarian emergencies, which goes beyond an initial support. Key elements of humanitarian aid are disaster management and humanitarian logistics, which operate as organizational principles in order to coordinate the supply of food, goods and emergency rescue workers. Due to the high dynamics and limited information transparency it is very difficult for the responsible persons to mitigate the plight as effectively as possible. A good method to develop effective disaster risk management strategies and decision-making mechanisms is the use of model-based planning and control approaches. This article discusses the current modeling challenges of humanitarian aid scenarios as well as the potential of ...

When selecting logistics strategies for their production networks, companies increasingly need to consider not only economic but as well environmental aspects. Those environmental aspects are, however, not easy to evaluate. This holds especially for SME with their limited resources. To assist companies in selecting a logistics strategy that meets their needs, a KPI framework to evaluate the economic and environmental sustainability of logistics strategies was developed within the Green-Net research project. Using the system dynamics approach, a simulation model was developed, which helps to anticipate and evaluate the impact of a certain logistics strategy on the company’s network.

Many companies are challenged to consider in the planning process for working times not only current laws, labour contracts and their operative goals but also the time-related wishes of their employees. One can identify different types of employees which differ in their working time preferences as well as in the work load they have to deal with in their private lifes. Therefore, the working time configuration has to take the specific situation of the employees into account. Consequently, the process of the working time configuration becomes highly complex. But there are currently no tools available that allow decision-makers of a company to evaluate an intended working time model prospectively (i.e. before its realization) while taking dynamic aspects of their operations as well as the work-life balance of the employees into account. At best, the work-life balance of the employees is a key figure for the evaluation of a working time model but not a parameter during the planning ...

In the field of micro manufacturing, a highly precise adjustment of relevant process parameters is of major importance. The continuing miniaturization of work pieces and machines leads to very small tolerances. The occurrence of so called size-effects interferes with a direct application of knowledge and experiences from macro manufacturing. Moreover, the high specialization of manufacturing technologies and processes in micro manufacturing requires a careful review of each process’s suitability with respect to the involved materials and components. This article presents a method that supports process designers with structured procedures and notations, to model and evaluate technological as well as logistic dependencies along the process chain. Thereby, it supports the selection and configuration of suitable processes for a given process chain.

The fourth industrial revolution promises a further automation of process control by cyber-physical systems. The individual products gain the ability for controlling their production and logistics themselves. By coordinating themselves they can jointly achieve business objectives. This logical decomposition reduces the complexity of cross-company process control significantly. Thus, even exceptions on short notice can be dealt with in real-time. In operation, the required artificial intelligence will usually not be implemented on the active objects. Instead, adequate software platforms for the so-called Industry 4.0 are required. This article investigates the requirements for such platforms and describes how they can be implemented.

Globalization and the growing number of supply chain participants lead to increasing cargo transport service and, thus, to higher energy demand. Although energy prices increase at the same time, the energy balance of production networks remains unconsidered during in the network design phase. Hence, the research project E²Log analyzes how logistics networks and production environment can be coordinated in order to improve energy efficiency. In the first project phase, based on the supply chain for the production of the Volkswagen Amarok, the use case partners have derived simulation scenarios and enhanced a simulation tool to evaluate measures for the efficiency increase without ignoring classic logistic objectives soon.

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.