Inhouse Seminar

Digitally Integrated Production

Industry 4.0 promises mostly one thing: Great flexibility in production. In the future it will be possible to adapt production to ever-changing versions of products and processes and still keep costs stable. Ideally, developments will even allow small and smallest batch sizes to be realized without causing production costs to explode. The key to these developments is to be found in networked information and communications technologies: In the factory of the future, all entities of production – from people through workpieces to machines and tools – will be connected by modern ICT, thus being able to communicate and cooperate directly. At the same time, production-related information will be available in real-time and can be presented, viewed and exchanged anywhere within the plant as tasks and situations demand.

Such systems will allow production to be organized differently in such a way that it will break open rigid manufacturing structures. Staff at all levels of the plant – from company management through production scheduling to the shop floor – can be informed about order data and process plans in a more comprehensive and effective way than ever before and may be involved in the management of production flows with the aid of intelligent tools.

How production may be structured more flexibly on this basis, is shown in this inhouse training along the process chain – from corporate-wide job management to work on individual machines. We present technologies developed and results achieved in the MetamoFAB, iWePro and pICASSO projects and in Fraunhofer IPK‘s preliminary research. Presentations are complemented with live demonstrations in our test field.