Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The global era of manufacturing is going on. Digital Manufacturing is one of the core strategies of the European Manufuture vision and strategic agenda towards the knowledge based production. It is driven by the application and standardization of information and communication technologies and the increasing demand for the efficiency of operations in global networks. The environment of manufacturing is turbulent and requires permanent adaptation of the manufacturing systems. Manufacturing Engineering covers wide scales from networks to processes and from real-time to long-term operations. The tools of future engineering and management of manufacturing are digital and distributed. Strategic aspects and the potential and the needs of research and development are the main positions of the presentation.

The design and the operation of global supply chains has become a new challenge for many production enterprises, additional to the existing problems in everyday practice.

However, with increasing success followed up by growth the weak points often show up in the order execution process. This becomes apparent in a bad delivery performance, increasing inventories and frequent special actions.

The consequences are that the essential business processes, product design, process design, production and order fulfillment must be reviewed in a comprehensive cooperative process. The classical single step order partially turns around due to the market priority of fulfilling customer wishes within short delivery times. Local optimization in a single enterprise can even be counterproductive.

The requirements for products, processes, production equipment and logistics in global supply chains require pliable solutions. These solutions have to take into account costs for material and added values at the respective production place, local conditions concerning knowledge and local content, currency relations between production locations and markets, commercial law terms, as well as protection from imitation.

The paper describes the challenge more from a scenario point of view, giving first solutions from industrial practice and formulating new fields of research in the production science.

This paper introduces the concept of Biological Manufacturing Systems (BMS), and then provides details of emergent synthesis. Next, it describes emergent synthesis based case studies of BMS: 1) Self-Organisation of Manufacturing Systems, 2) Emergence of Supply Chain Networks, and 3) BMS Introducing Bounded Rationality.

This keynote paper focuses on the process plans and planning functions as the important link between the features of generations of products/product families and the features, capabilities and configurations of manufacturing systems and components throughout their respective life cycles. The challenges presented by the paradigm shift in manufacturing systems and their increased flexibility and changeability require corresponding responsiveness in all support functions. Process planning is part of the “soft” or “logical” enablers of changeability in this new environment. New perspectives on process planning for Flexible (FMS) and Reconfigurable (RMS) manufacturing systems in integrated digital manufacturing enterprises are presented. Process plans reconfiguration and their pre-requisites, characteristics, modeling and solution approaches, potential automation, and integration with both products and systems models as they evolve are discussed. New concepts of “Evolving Products Families” and “Reconfigurable Process Plans” are introduced and their ramifications for process planning approaches are outlined. The distinguishing features of process plans and planning methodologies in flexible, reconfigurable and changeable manufacturing systems, for both planned and un-planned products changes, are highlighted. Future research directions and challenges in process planning, being one of the enablers for changeable and responsive manufacturing systems, are presented.

Collaborative networks offer a high potential for survival and value creation in enterprises under turbulent market conditions. Collaboration manifests in a large variety of forms, including virtual organizations, virtual enterprises, dynamic supply chains, professional virtual communities, etc. In order to support preparedness of enterprises for participation in such dynamic coalitions, breeding environments for virtual organizations are being developed in many application sectors. A large body of empiric knowledge related to collaborative networks is already available, but only recently the research community started to focus on the consolidation of this knowledge and building the foundations for a more sustainable development of the area. The definition of reference models and the establishment of a scientific discipline for collaborative networks are strong instruments in achieving this purpose. In this paper a brief survey of the main characteristics of the area is presented, current baseline is discussed, and future trends are pointed out.

In this paper we discuss the difficulties of customized mass production in case of high manufacturing setup costs and unstable markets, where due to high service level requirements and demand volatility the risk of remaining obsolete inventory is significant. We propose a two-level logistics framework for coordinating supply channels in such production networks and methods for medium-term lot sizing decisions considering uncertainty.

The current situation in product development, production scheduling and factory design is characterized by collaborative engineering, participative factory design and fragmentation of value-added chains. According to this trend, new challenges are to meet around this field. From increasing use of multiple IT tools (creation, verification and information management systems) a distributed heterogeneous IT-landscape is growing which affects all processes and leads to financial risks. Regarding this, product development and factory design require a transparent and redundancy-free information flow in order to accomplish this complexity. A federative FDM (factory data management) provides a federation of PDM and FDM-systems as well as distributed applications. It builds a solid foundation for acquisition and propagation of factor-related data. It enables efficient integration and aggregation of data to support technical and economical decisions for downstream phases of factory planning and to overcome the prevailing deficits. The vision and approaches are described in this paper, based on SOA technology and on a reference information model as a common ontology to overcome the semantic and syntactic heterogeneities of all involved domainspecific applications and multiple systems in this surrounding field.

The market conditions that manufacturing companies are currently exposed to, leads to high demands in terms of flexibility in production and thus to a high number of engineering changes in production. In this paper, an approach will be presented to support engineering change processes, to identify the change impact within production and to process multiple engineering changes simultaneously. Therefore, the elements of production systems as well as their attributes and relations will be represented by using UML. These are used in VR to identify potential impact on other elements when changing an element. After this, a change impact matrix is deduced and a similarity analysis between changes is conducted. The measure of similarity will be used to combine multiple engineering changes to engineering change projects.

The global market with increasing competition calls for new strategies that strengthen the future manufacturing systems. This paper presents the underlying models and ideas enabling a new conceptual framework for the next generation of Virtual Factory implementations. The approach fosters four pillars: a standard extensible data model; decoupled functional modules, based on an object oriented Virtual Factory paradigm; an event driven paradigm at the core of abstract objects management; the integration of knowledge at different layers for the decoupled functional modules. The implementation of a Virtual Factory based on the presented framework, points to the usefulness when developing future manufacturing systems.

Implementation agility in Manufacturing Systems (MS) is one of the most important objectives for MS considering the complexity of environment. Agility implementation implies new characteristics as well as new implications not considered by the previous MS concept. These are: the dynamic reconfigurability of MS structure (in the first place), pro-activity, the emergence (as inherent features of agility), and the need for integration of resources outside the original MS. These characteristics imply needs for specific organizational tools and frameworks. The issue is presented in a two-part paper first one presenting the requirements and principles of agility and MS reconfigurability – and the second part presenting two architectures for MS reconfigurability in support of MS agility as well as two applications of the proposed architectures.