Aligning the product and factory life cycles: Engineering Apps for advanced manufacturing engineering

Today, manufacturing is being shaped by the paradigm shift from mass production to on demand dictated, personalised, customer-driven and knowledge-based proactive production. Thus, shorter product life cycles, an increased number of product varieties, high performance processes, flexible machines and production systems result in an increased complexity in all Factory Level domains from product design, process development, factory and production planning to factory operation. To handle this complexity, new knowledge-based methods, technologies and tools to model, simulate, optimise and monitor planned and existing manufacturing systems are required. The consideration of ICT-based support in all the above mentioned domains is called advanced Manufacturing Engineering (aME). The different life cycles will be aligned by the development of a Reference Model that provides a detailed overview of all relevant domain specific and inter-domain interdependencies. This life cycle-oriented model enables the alignment of product design, process development, factory planning as well as production planning and factory operation. This approach envisions that all stakeholders in these activities will be supported by solution-oriented and service-based software components, systems or digital tools will enable a holistic planning and optimisation of products, processes and factories along their aligned life cycles without creating a single overloaded, hardly manageable system. These are called Engineering Apps (eApps). Their realisation will increase the productivity in all Manufacturing Engineering activities with creating more reliable and efficient manufacturing conditions, and will support the achievement of higher process robustness and accuracy to provide the manufacturing customers with higher and more stable product and service quality