Novel manufacturing engineering apps to improve planning and operation activities in manufacturing environments
Good production planning and operation involves a large number of interrelated activities distributed throughout manufacturing facilities that must be carefully coordinated. For manufacturing companies to stay in business, it is of critical importance that they are also able to evaluate multiple production systems and process designs before investing in a single prototype. The EU-funded APPS4AME (Engineering apps for advanced manufacturing engineering) project set out to provide companies with the solution they need to manage their entire factories. Project partners developed a series of reference models based on the state of the art of reference models for product, processes and factory life cycles. This led to the creation of a generic and flexible merged reference model that represents a factory's internal engineering processes from product design to manufacturing. They also established a knowledge-based platform to support engineering activities throughout product, factory and process life cycles. The APPS4AME team developed 22 eApps that enable stakeholders to capture, model, represent and share information across all phases of development of even the most complex products – from idea to design, production and servicing. These eApps, which use this knowledge-based platform, are easily deployable on various devices such as tablets, smartphones, PCs, workstations, cloud, grid and high-performance computer clusters. Project researchers defined and developed best practices and a business model to exploit the eApps. They also assessed their performance, feasibility and acceptance through four demonstrators representing several industries. Thanks to APPS4AME, automotive, machining, food processing, and information and communications technology companies will have a robust solution that facilitates decision-making and reduces their products' time to market in their hands.
Keywords
Manufacturing engineering, engineering apps, time to market, production planning, APPS4AME
