FIR e. V. an der RWTH Aachen
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (241) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (241)
Keywords
- 02 (27)
- 03 (16)
- 04 (1)
- 3GPP (1)
- 5G (6)
- 5G mobile communication (1)
- 5G use case (1)
- 5G-Technology (1)
- AAL (1)
- AI (5)
Institute
- FIR e. V. an der RWTH Aachen (241)
- Produktionsmanagement (79)
- Dienstleistungsmanagement (72)
- Informationsmanagement (69)
- Business Transformation (30)
For developing a European industrial cooperation and involvement in the furniture industry, the international research project INEDIT conducted a survey for furniture customers. By finding out the needs and wishes of the customer regarding innovative products and the production process the project will establish a new way for designing and producing furniture. Within INEDIT a platform is built on which customized, technologically innovative and sustainable furniture can be created and produced in a co-creation process. The furniture industry should thus become significantly more flexible, transparent and sustainable. Following the "do-it-together" approach, a business ecosystem will be generated which creates added value not only for customers but also for designers, suppliers and manufacturing companies. In order to involve the customer even more actively in the design process and the production, the platform will provide access to a mix of digital and physical services and is linked to all other stakeholders in the value chain. To match the platform and the process to the needs, wishes and demands of the customer an anonymous survey with 300 participants was developed and conducted. By analyzing the survey, important factors were found for buying and for using furniture considering new technological inventions (e.g. 3D-printing or smart objects), sustainability of the products and the production process. Furthermore, the potential customer-group and their usage of the do-it-together process and additional activities can be tightened.
Manufacturing companies worldwide recognized the high potential of Industrie 4.0 in order to increasing production efficiency. Key benefits include creation of integrated systems, networked products and improvement of service portfolios. However, for many companies deriving and evaluating necessary measures to use Industrie 4.0 potentials represents a major challenge. This paper introduces the "acatech Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index" as an approach to meet this challenge. The development of multidimensional maturity model intents to provide companies an assessment methodology. The aim is to capture the status quo in companies in order to be able to develop individual roadmaps for the successful introduction of Industrie 4.0 and manage the transformation progressively.
Electronic appliance manufacturers are facing the challenge of frequent product orders. Based on each product order, the assembly process and workstations need to be planned. An essential part of the assembly planning is defining the assembly sequence, considering the mechanical product’s design, and handling of the product’s components. The assembly sequence determines the order of processes for each workstation, the overall layout, and thereby time and cost. Currently, the assembly sequence is decided by industrial engineers through a manual approach that is time-consuming, complex, and requires technical expertise. To reduce the industrial engineers’ manual effort, a Computer-Aided Assembly Sequence Planning (CAASP) system is proposed in this paper. It compromises the components for a comprehensive system that aims to be applied practically. The system uses Computer-Aided Design (CAD) files to derive Liaison and Interference Matrices that represent a mathematical relationship between parts. Subsequently, an adapted Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm generates an optimized assembly sequence based on these relationships. Through a web browser-based application, the user can upload files and interact with the system. The system is conceptualized and validated using the CAD file of an electric motor example product. The results are discussed, and future work is outlined.
This paper addresses the challenge of a systematic requirement-oriented configuration and selection of cyber physical systems (CPS) for SMEs. As the key technologies of realizing the digitalization and interconnection of production processes, manufacturing companies have realized the potential benefits brought by CPS. However, due to the
complexity and fast development of CPS technology, it is difficult for SMEs, which lack expertise and financial resources, to select the appropriate CPS technologies meeting both functional and financial requirements. To overcome the issue, an online matching platform is developed to let SMEs express their needs and assist them onceptualize
the individual CPS. This paper presents the matching methodology of the matching platform, which can not only match technical characteristics but also evaluate economic potentials. Then, it was demonstrated by a tracking and tracing use case in the end-of-line assembly of a small-sized German electric automobile manufacturer.
Low-Level-Code Based Production Model For Improving Material Requirements Planning In ERP Systems
(2021)
Single and small-series production companies face specific challenges, such as variable customer order decoupling points (CODP), decreasing quantities and rising cost pressure. This leads to a increasing production complexity and growing requirements on Production Planning and Control (PPC). Digitalization’s direct links between objects, people, and machines as well as detailed recording of production progresses opens new solutions for PPC. However, volume of data and the required processing times are increasing. Thus, to achieve near-real-time data processing, a decentralization of decision-making systems can be observed. The function Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is PPC’s original need for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Here, PPC’s overall problem (to fulfil primary requirements for products) is divided into subproblems (to fulfil single production orders). Especially companies characterized by an organization in accordance to the workshop principle, high in-house production depth and variable CODP are confronted with high dynamics in their production systems. This ends in significant differences between primary requirements (overall problem) and single production orders (subproblems). Ultimately, these insufficient PPC data result systematically in a non-optimal overall solution despite optimal partial solutions. This publication combines PPC’s fundamentals from existing commonly known models with current implementation concepts of ERP systems. A newly developed Low-Level-Code based Production Model provides explanations for deviations between the overall problem and its subproblems. Furthermore, information flows of PPC can be structured between a periodically actualized vertical and an event driven horizontal information flow. These recognitions lead to an improvement of PPC by ERP systems.
In the course of the advancing digitalization, new business fields are characterized by a mixture of competition and cooperation of the actors involved. MOORE (1993) postulates that in analogy to natural ecosystems, long-term successful companies also operate in comparable network structures. In this context, there are pronounced controversies about the extent to which there are leading actors in such a business ecosystem and to what extent they can control the entire system. Similarly, it is largely unclear where the boundaries of a business ecosystem actually lie and how meaningful selective boundaries are. Especially the extent of the coopetition proves to be characteristic for the relationship between the involved actors. Therefore, the aim of this research approach is to develop a new approach for the analysis of corporate ecosystems. To ensure applicability, the developed approach was validated in a current case study in the telecommunications industry.
Feeding the growing world population is a scientific and economic challenge. The target variables to be optimised are the yield that can be produced on a given area and the reduction of the resources used for this purpose. High-wage countries are faced with the problem that the use of personnel is a significant cost driver. Developing countries, on the other hand, usually operate on much smaller field sizes, so that the work in the field is still strongly characterised by manual labour. One solution to meet these challenges is the use of smaller autonomous harvesting robots. These can be networked into a swarm of machines to work even larger fields. The networking of autonomous agricultural machines is a key use case for rural 5G networks. 5G technology can offer many advantages over older mobile communications standards and therefore make use cases more efficient or enable new ones. Various use cases are also conceivable in the field of agriculture, yet it is unclear how 5G networks can and must be specified for this purpose. In this paper, using the example of 5G-connected harvesters powered by swarm robotics, we present the challenges that have arisen and the specification that has been developed.
For most industries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds substantial potentials. In the last decades, the extent of data created worldwide is exponentially increasing, and this trend is likely to continue. However, despite the prospects, many companies are not yet using AI at all or not generating added value. Often, an AI project does not exceed its pilot phase and is not scaled up. The problems to create value from AI applications in companies are manifold, especially since AI itself is diverse and there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. One often stated obstacle, why many AI projects fail, is a missing AI strategy. This leads to isolated solutions, which do not consider synergies, scalability and seldom result in added value for the company. To create a company-specific AI strategy with a top-down approach, a generic but holistic framework is needed. This paper proposes a strategic AI procedure model that enables companies to define a specific AI strategy for successfully implementing AI solutions. In addition, we demonstrate in this paper how we apply the introduced strategic AI procedure model on an AI-based flexible monitoring and regulation system for power distribution grid operators in the context of an ongoing research project.
The agricultural industry is facing unprecedented challenges in meeting the growing demand for food while minimizing its impact on the environment. To address these challenges, the industry is embracing technological advancements such as 5G networks to improve efficiency and productivity. However, the benefits of 5G technology must be weighed against the costs of implementing a suitable network. This paper presents cost-benefit dimensions that are needed to assess the economic feasibility of implementing 5G networks for several agricultural applications. The paper describes the costs of deploying and maintaining a 5G network and the benefits of several 5G-specific use cases, including precision agriculture, livestock monitoring, and swarm robotics. Using industry reports and case studies, the model quantifies the benefits of 5G networks, such as enabling new digital agricultural processes, increased productivity, and improved sustainability. It also considers the costs associated with equipment and infrastructure, as well as the challenges of deploying a network in rural areas. The results demonstrate that 5G networks can provide significant benefits to agricultural businesses and provide an overview about the cost factors. Both benefit and cost dimensions are analyzed for the 5G-specific agricultural use cases.
A large number of product-accompanying services in the machinery and plant engineering industry is based on the cross-company exchange of data and information. By providing services, additional sales potential on the manufacturer side as well as far-reaching product and process advantages for appliers can be reached. However, the necessary cross-company exchange of information is nowadays limited due to a lack of trust in the interacting partner and the applicable existing technologies, which results in significant losses in the terms of business potential. The uncovering of this potential now seems to be made possible by the use of the Blockchain technology. Through the key factors security, immutability, transparency and decentralisation, it serves as an enabler for cross-company communication and product-accompanying services. The technological implementation of a Blockchain can take on a broad spectrum of attributes, which can lead to decisive restrictions for the execution of services. This justifies the necessity for a qualified and context-related assessment of service-types-individual specifications and the resulting requirements on the system. Within the scope of this paper, different types of product-accompanying services are identified and analysed regarding their requirements for a Blockchain-based machinery and plant connection. This can serve as a basis for a qualified and goal-oriented configuration of the Blockchain.