Objective
Situation
Market dynamic is rapidly increasing and users are demanding higher product quality, individual design and shorter delivery times. Producing companies have to meet these requirements to keep a strong market position. Consequently, production systems have to be adapted continuously to the production of different variants or to new product types. Due to the adaptation of the production system in different sections only suboptima are reached. The overall operating capacity and efficiency of the production system will currently not be assessed.
Goals
For this reason an integrated tool will be developed for the Evaluation and Analysis of production SYstems for optimised
CONfiguration and implementation (EASYCON). The evaluation of manufacturing systems will be executed on different levels from single machines to production lines. The evaluation results will be used for: Benchmarking of production systems Either a production system can be evaluated in respect of its ability to manufacture different product variants or its benchmarking values can be compared with other production systems of a similar product spectrum. Control strategies Critical criteria of the production system will be determined and strategies will support the improvement of its overall performance. Planning strategies Alternative production system configurations will be generated and justified.
Procedure
A unified description language (UDL) will be defined and used for: - the documentation of a current system configuration and its status
- the description of an ideal system configuration developed by product analysis
On the basis of the UDL the current and ideal system configuration will be analysed and evaluated in respect of predefined criteria (e.g. time, costs, quality, flexibility consumption of resources, and environmental aspects).
A planning module will be developed to generate and compare
different configuration alternatives to achieve the ideal status as far as possible.
A control module will monitor the actual system configuration, recognise its critical criteria in order to improve its status. The analysis of the state of the art, international and national standards as well as market situation showed that different systems are available for several sectors of the manufacturing area. But it has also shown that there is a strong industrial need for an integrated tool for the
investigation of production systems efficiency,
its fast and reliable implementation
direct support for the control and
optimised configuration of manufacturing systems.
Link to the B/E research areas: A direct link to thc objectives 1.1. I .S, I . I .2.S 2.2.2.S and I . I .3.L of the Brite EuRam 111 work programme is given:
This integrated tool ensures a fast and reliable cvaluation and adaptation of production systems in respect of time cfficiency and cost reduction.
The implementation of new technologies can be supported by using the analysis results of investigated production systems and gained experience.
Production systems will be optimised by adaptation, substitution and/or integration.
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
70567 Stuttgart
Germany