Impact and risk analysis in the integrated development of product and production system

Abstract

The assessment of risks and influences of engineering changes of a product or production system on affected technical (sub-) systems of the same or a different domain are of great importance in order to evaluate possible alternatives and to select solutions. The increasing complexity of mechatronic products and production systems with Industry 4.0 technology reinforces the demand for a method that supports engineers in decision making in both technical and strategic issues. By using the method presented in this contribution, interdependencies between product functions, product features and the corresponding production processes and machines can be modelled and used to estimate the impact and risks of changes in one of those domains. Using the method, the change propagation of variations in and between the domains can be evaluated. The objective of the method is to support decision making in different use-cases like integrated product- and production system development, product variations while carrying over most of the production system or varying production processes while carrying over the product to improve production key performance indicators (KPI). Based on the model of PGE – Product Generation Engineering, the information of the reference system is used to identify the interdependencies. The inclusion of strategic factors like know-how and costs is implemented in the model, as well as the quantity and type of variations. The method consists of a representative model for a quick, holistic overview about the interdependencies and of a tool based model by using Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for an automatic connection and evaluation of the data. The contribution is part of the project I4TP - Sino German Industry 4.0 Factory Automation Platform (i4tp.org), in which a platform is developed to automatically configure a turnkey production system for a product in development.