Production engineering

About: Production engineering is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2657 publications have been published within this topic receiving 37409 citations.

Controlling Smart Production Processes Using RESTful Web Services andFederative Factory Data Management

Abstract: Today’s production processes use smart devices within production resources and within produced products. Using web technologies they enable world-wide access and exchange of real-time production data on the one hand as well as autonomous and context-adaptive decision making within the production process on the other hand. For the management of such smart production processes the integration of smart devices into existing production data management is required. Gathering, processing and transforming the product data enables new possibilities for planning and controlling smart production processes. In this paper a framework for the integration of smart production data into federative factory data management is specified first. Then two use cases illustrate the application of the approach in practice. A first use case explains benefits for management decision by continuously monitoring the smart production process. The second use case describes possibilities for controlling the smart production process at shop floor level.

Media-assisted product and process traceability in supply chain engineering

Abstract: Many engineering domains involve an intricate interplay of conceptual synthesis of alternative requirements and design configurations, preliminary impact analysis of these alternatives using complex simulations and multimedia visualizations, and human decision-making. Design traceability in such settings must be both product-oriented and process-oriented: it must enable an efficient media-based comparison of product alternatives from the current project or related experiences, and it must facilitate reuse of modeling experiences to avoid unnecessary repetition of negative experiences. We have studied these problems in a large interdisciplinary project whose aim it is to optimize supply chains linking chemical engineering, plastics engineering, and related application demands e.g. in the automotive industry. A number of novel experience reuse tools have been designed and implemented as part of a process-integrated modeling environment.

The green engineer as an enabler of life-cycle management in manufacturing: models and practices

Abstract: The last 20 years corporate environmental management has developed from pollution control and emission prevention, to include a greater responsibility for indirect environmental issues along the whole product life cycle. This thesis aims at providing a better understanding of how such environmental life-cycle management can be applied on manufacturing processes. Previous environmental management research has argued for the integration environmental work in daily operations. This thesis investigates how the production engineers in the operational core of the organization may better understand and take action to reduce the life-cycle environmental impact of manufacturing processes. Through the use of both practice studies and life-cycle assessment (LCA) method development, two research questions are explored; regarding (1) how the LCA methodology can be adapted for producing results that make sense to engineers in manufacturing, and (2) what is influencing production engineers to consider environmental aspects in their daily work. The conventional product-centred LCA methodology is redefined to capture the environmental performance of a manufacturing process. The approach takes into account the power of influence of production engineers, and produce results that are related to the production processes of a company. The LCA method is combined with discrete-event simulation (DES) to identify technical improvement potentials in the manufacturing system. The proposed LCA-DES method offers the possibility to recognize, for a particular work role in manufacturing, the most significant factors influencing the environmental performance of manufacturing processes. From the practice studies a wider organizational perspective is applied. The analysis unfolds the challenges of a transition from facility-oriented environmental management to life-cycle management in manufacturing. First, the prevailing understanding that it is preferable with a co-management of several issues, leading to an “integration” of various management systems, for environmental management is challenged. Second, a need of distinguishing between direct and indirect emissions in environmental management in manufacturing is identified. The work to reduce indirect impacts of manufacturing operations need to be driven by manufacturing and engineering managers and thus be included in the normal work of improving the technical performance of the manufacturing process. The thesis presents a model to understand why socio-technical factors become either a barrier or driver for the engineers to include environmental aspects in their work. It includes organizational factors, similar to earlier literature, but sees them from the perspective of the individual engineer, instead of as abstract factors, applied to describe the whole system, or organization. The proposed decision making model describes the driving force of environmental work as residing in the interplay of these factors. It is the situational interaction of several factors that determine action by the engineers and thereby also the environmental life-cycle work in the company.