Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0

In some branches customers require more specialized and individualized products (e.g. individual assembly of cars or furniture). These aspects result in a larger variety of goods and in smaller lot-sizes. The procurement process becomes more challenging, the scheduling and lot-sizing decisions in the production process are more complex and intertwined. Sequence dependency and availability of raw material has to be considered. Furthermore, the manufacturing industry underlies also technological changes and transformations such as additive manufacturing and the application of cobots. Cobots are robots which are intended to physically interact with humans on the job floor. These new requirements for individualized products lead to dynamic process changes.

In return for the availability of real-time production data from the manufacturing facilities it is possible and necessary to handle the new complex process design, resource allocation, lot sizing and scheduling problem dynamically. The complete production process can be steadily re-optimized and dynamic process changes can be performed by combining reality with computer simulation. Reactive simulation-optimization processes provide accurate plans of the current production program by exchanging real-time data with the simulation model.