Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESEIndustrie 4.0 – Concepts and Solutions
Individuality is becoming increasingly important in our society today. This change is also reflected in the purchasing behavior of end consumers. As a result, the focus is increasingly shifting towards the need to be able to manufacture a wide variety of products and product variants with high efficiency. This need must also be reflected in the manufacturing processes. Although today’s manufacturing processes are highly efficient, they are mostly inflexible.
A change of the type of product can therefore entail great effort and thus high costs. Potential customers who want to produce small lot sizes are faced with high costs per unit, which might jeopardize the profitability of their projects.
The transition to Industrie 4.0 promises to remedy this. Flexibilization of the production processes enables fast and cost-efficient change of the product type. This makes it possible to manufacture even orders of lot size 1 profitably and thereby allows for greater competitiveness. Furthermore, the use of previously unused data from production process enables completely new insights.
But how is this transition to Industrie 4.0 to take place? It requires an efficient automation solution – a piece of software – that supports the flexible workflows in a manufacturing process.