assemblean is an automation and production technology company emerging from years of research in the field of decentralized production control. Xiaojun Yang and Alexander Pöhler investigated the question of how to increase the utilization of production
facilities. It became apparent that many production capacities remain unused. During this research at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the university of Paderborn, we developed a decentralized production control system, with which existing production systems can be equipped. These control systems then communicate with each other in order to subsequently take over production control automatically. This leads to significant improvements in production processes. In addition, the production control systems identify
free capacities automatically. assemblean wants to use these capacities and make them available to other companies. For this purpose, a Production-as-a-Service platform has been developed. In order to use the platform as intended a connection between the control system and the platform needed to be established and a lot of obstacles concerning the business model and organizational requirements needed to be solved.
This project served mostly for the concretization of the business model in order to develop concepts for contracts and in general for finding a solution for pricing respectively offering production services. It shall be a first step to an actual production as a service platform, which not only includes the manufacturing of parts with certain production processes, but also modules and complete products including assembly and quality control.