Axiomatic Design of Agile Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The trend of shifting abroad personnel-intensive assembly from Europe to foreign countries continues. Manufacturing systems widely differ in investment, demand and output. Since sales figures can hardly be forecasted, it is necessary to conceptualize highly flexible and adaptable systems which can be upgraded by more scale-economic solutions during product life cycle, even under extremely difficult forecasting conditions. Unlike flexible systems, agile ones are expected to be capable of actively varying their own structure. Due to the unpredictability of change, they are not limited to a pre-defined system range typical for so called flexible systems but are required to shift between different levels of systems ranges. Modern manufacturing systems are increasingly required to be adaptable to changing market demands, which adds to their structural and operational complexity (Matt, 2005). Thus, one of the major challenges at the early design stages is to select an manufacturing system configuration that allows both – a high efficiency due to a complexity reduced (static) system design, and a enhanced adaptability to changing environmental requirements without negative impact on system complexity. Organizational functional periodicity is a mechanism that enables the re-initialization of an organization in general and of a manufacturing system in particular. It is the result of converting the combinatorial complexity caused by the dynamics of socioeconomic systems into a periodic complexity problem of an organization. Starting from the Axiomatic Design (AD) based complexity theory this chapter investigates on the basis of a long-term study performed in an industrial company the effects of organizational periodicity as a trigger for a regular organizational reset on the agility and the sustainable performance of a manufacturing system. Besides the presentation of the AD based design template which helps system designers to design efficient and flexible manufacturing systems, the main findings of this research can be summarized as follows: organizational functional periodicity depends on environmentally triggered socio-economic changes. The analysis of the economic cycle shows high degrees of periodicity, which can be used to actively trigger a company’s action for change, before market and environment force it to. Along an economic sinus interval of about 9 years, sub-periods are defined that trigger the re-initialization of a manufacturing system’s set of FRs and thus establish the system’s agility. 9