Internet of Production: Challenges, Potentials, and Benefits for Production Processes due to Novel Methods in Digitalization

Abstract

AbstractIn industrial production, customers’ requirements are rising regarding various aspects. Products have to be produced more economical, more flexible, faster, and with much higher quality requirements. Furthermore, especially for traditional mass production processes, shorter product cycles increase the demand in rapid production and process development. The inherent increased product and production complexity raises additional challenges not only in development but also in setup and operation. Lastly, upcoming requirements for sustainable production have to be incorporated. These conflicting aspects lead to increasing complexity for production development as well as production setup at each individual production step as well as along the complete value chain. To master these challenges, digitalization and data-driven models are fundamental tools, since these allow for the automation of many basic tasks as well as processing of large data sets to achieve process understanding and derive appropriate measures. This chapter illustrates requirements for digital systems to be created and benefits derived by different novel systems. Furthermore, because modern systems have to incorporate not only single processes but complex process chains, various production processes and assembly processes are taken into account. In the following chaps. 13, “Decision Support for the Optimization of Continuous Processes Using Digital Shadows,” 14, “Modular Control and Services to Operate Lineless Mobile Assembly Systems,” 12, “Improving Manufacturing Efficiency for Discontinuous Processes by Methodological Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer,” and 11, “Model-Based Controlling Approaches for Manufacturing Processes,” digitalization and Industry 4.0 approaches are presented, which incorporate data-driven models for a wide variety of production processes and for different time scales. Many techniques are illustrated to generate benefits on various levels due to the use of data-driven, model-based systems, which are incorporated into a digital infrastructure.