Factory Life Cycle Research Articles

Towards a Holistic Life Cycle Costing and Assessment of Factories: Qualitative Modeling of Interdependencies in Factory Systems

Modern factory planning requires a holistic perspective taking economic as well as environmental sustainability over the entire factory life cycle into account. As a complex socio-technical system, the factory life cycle consists of multiple life cycles of the inherent factory elements. A holistic understanding of the individual life cycles and their interdependencies is missing for both planning and operation of a factory. Therefore, the goal is to develop a system understanding about life cycle-oriented factory planning and to analyze the contribution of relevant factory elements to the sustainability of a factory. As a result, a knowledge base for life cycle costing and assessment of the entire factory is established using an impact path model. The qualitative model supports factory planners in deriving planning measures for the sustainable design of a factory and in determining data requirements for the quantitative evaluation of the economic and environmental sustainability of a factory. It shows that the production and logistics concepts essentially define the sustainability potential during planning, while the resulting life cycle behavior of the process facilities and workers is responsible for the majority of costs and environmental impacts of a factory. Factory planners must therefore become aware of the implications of planning decisions on factory operation when developing concepts in the future.

Concept for modeling and quantitative evaluation of life cycle dynamics in factory systems

Against the background of the climate crisis, fast innovation space in emerging technologies and the global competitive environment for manufacturing companies, a sound understanding of the life cycle behavior of factory systems becomes more and more important. The decision context of the factory life cycle conveys a high level of complexity, e.g. by the heterogeneous nature of factory element life cycles, manifold interactions between them as well as external change drivers. A model-based understanding as well as methods and tools are required that support factory planners and operators in this regard. This paper presents an approach for the modeling and quantitative evaluation of life cycle dynamics in factory systems while respecting the dynamic behavior of factory operation, as well. The purpose of the modeling is to deepen the knowledge of the prevailing life cycle mechanisms and their implications for factory planning and operation. The application of the approach is demonstrated in an exemplary case study.

A systematic literature review on the Digital Twin of the factory in the context of the product and factory lifecycle

The concept of the digital twin can be applied to a wide variety of areas in a company. A fundamental distinction can be made between digital twins of a product or service, digital twins of processes and digital twins of resources. The combination of process and resource twin forms the operational twin of a factory. In order to lay the foundations for the digital twin of the factory, corresponding requirements must already be taken into account in product development. In a structured literature review, this paper examines the interactions between product development and factory planning and operation at the data level. In addition, common use cases for the digital twin of the factory are examined to develop an understanding of its characteristics. On this basis, some possible activities for further research activities will be discussed.

Factory life cycle evaluation through integrated analysis of factory elements

In consequence of the technological advances of the last few decades, factories emerged to highly complex systems that consist of numerous factory elements like production machines, technical building services and the building shell. These factory elements are characterized by individual life cycles that differ in their duration and life cycle behavior. Consequently, the factory life cycle is composed of multiple overlapping life cycles. The fact that the life cycle of some factory elements (e.g. the building shell) exceeds the life cycle of other elements over many times (e.g. of machines) presents a challenge for factory planners. In particular, factory planners struggle to understand the contribution of single factory elements on the total factory life cycle. Consequently, it is hard to systematically synchronize the inherent life cycles of a factory while adhering to manifold requirements. Against this background, the goal of this paper is to develop a methodology that supports factory planners in the evaluation of the factory life cycle. The proposed methodology enhances the understanding of how factory elements contribute to the factory life cycle and what is the current life cycle state of the entire factory. To this end, the factory system is broken down on its constituting elements. A modified failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is applied to assess their life cycle priority according to economic, environmental and technical criteria. The methodology is exemplarily demonstrated on a pilot scale battery production system.

Evaluation of the influence of change drivers on the factory life cycle

Factories consist of numerous factory elements with individual life cycles. Besides technical aspects such as wear, their actual lifetime is influenced by change drivers from an increasingly dynamic market environment. As a result, factory elements may experience a premature end due to changed requirements before the end of their technical lifetime. The difficulty in factory planning is to understand the behavior of the life cycles in order to make management decisions. Therefore, the goal is to identify change drivers and evaluate their influence on the factory life cycle, while taking into account the technical functionality.

Life cycle assessment of an automotive factory: Identifying challenges for the decarbonization of automotive production – A case study

Climate change stabilization at 1.5–2 °C requires the transition to low-carbon societies, which imposes the need to decarbonize automotive manufacturing in accordance with the Science-Based Target Initiative for industries. The decarbonization of an automotive factory requires a holistic and systemic understanding of all ecologically-relevant resource flows, the implementation of adequate mitigation solutions and a life-cycle thinking in planning and operation. The application of a life cycle perspective on a factory has merely been conceptual, which imposes the need for a the development of an adequate systemic understanding, a quantified analysis and the identification of challenges associated with decarbonization. A Life Cycle Assessment has been conducted to quantify the life cycle of a state-of-the-art automotive factory (for the first time), identify decarbonization challenges and provide a differentiated analysis as a basis for planning and decision-making in practice. The applied case study provided various insights: (i) the use stage represents the most GWP-intensive life cycle stage; (ii) efficiency, substitutional and compensation approaches are necessary to achieve a full decarbonization; (iii) use stage-related mitigation is not sufficient to achieve a low-pathway (iv) decarbonization requires the interplay of planners, operators and suppliers of process material, machinery and construction and (vi) electric vehicle production increases the GWP-intensity of the production. Despite uncertainties in data inventory and modelling - the presented case represents a first but valid approach to identify transformative challenges of an automotive factory life cycle for sustainable development.

Virtual Factory: Digital Twin Based Integrated Factory Simulations

The co-evolution problem, which is known as the concurrent evolution of products, processes and production systems, along with increased complexity and shorter manufacturing operation lifecycles, makes modelling, simulation and evaluation of such operations challenging activities for industry players. This paper presents the concept of a digital twin-based virtual factory (VF) and its architecture to support modelling, simulation and evaluation of manufacturing systems while employing multi-user (collaborative and coordinated) virtual reality (VR) learning/training scenarios. This paper also addresses how digital twin-based virtual factory can support factory lifecycle processes by demonstrating the concept in a wind turbine manufacturing plant, including preliminary evaluation by industry experts.

On knowledge reuse for manufacturing systems design and planning: A semantic technology approach

This research study deals with the early design and planning of manufacturing systems, following a knowledge reuse approach. The proposed approach introduces a knowledge based framework that facilitates the definition, storage and extraction of knowledge in terms of past production process configurations. The semantic technology and artificial intelligence approaches, such as inference rules and similarity measurement, are the main pillars of the framework. The knowledge based framework is integrated into a greater one, namely, the Virtual Factory Framework that allows for knowledge extraction from data produced by a series of software tools used during the entire factory lifecycle. The concept and the implementation are tested at the early design and planning of a steel fabrication line case study.

Effects of Climate Change on Factory Life Cycle

Climate change and global warming have negative consequences for humans and nature. While many research activities analyze the effects of industrial production on global warming and aim to develop actions using rare resources more efficiently and reducing CO2-emission, the effects of climate change on industrial production is rarely discussed. Hence, manufacturing companies are considered in research as cause of climate change and not as affected by climate change. Thus, there is no systematic consideration of effects of climate change in factory planning. This leads to expensive adaptions within factory life cycle. For this reason the paper identifies ecological, economical and social changes caused by the climate change. These changes are analyzed on their effects on factories and prioritized according to their risk for the company. Subsequently, the identified changes are matched to different functions of factory planning. The matching allows developing planning-related and preventive strategy to cope with changes during factory life cycle.

VR Enhanced Scenario Technique Supporting the Early Phases of Factory Planning

Industrial companies have to face fast changing markets and increasing customer demands regarding individual configuration of products. Within this turbulent environment initially defined planning circumstances and assumptions are no longer reliable over the whole factory life-cycle. As one approach to react on such uncertainties, flexible production planning is considered. Factories should be able to adapt according to changing demands and suit to even unforeseen constraints. To allow such flexibility, the factory planning process must be executed with special attention on the early phases. While setting up the key objectives and establishing the project basis, a focus on flexibility has to be mandatory. The constraints on which planning bear on need to be defined, but also their adaptation over the factory life-cycle must be considered. To overcome this dilemma of required level of detail but concurrent uncertain future estimations, scenario technique is proposed as a method in strategic company management. This paper deals with the extension of the scenario technique to be applicable during factory planning as one operative method in the early phases of ‘preparation’ and ‘structure planning’. By using immersive Virtual Reality (VR) tools, a visualization component will be added. This will make future scenarios more graspable for multi-domain planning teams and serve as a mean of communication on which decision making can be set up.

On an Integrated Knowledge based Framework for Manufacturing Systems Early Design Phase

This research work deals with the early design of manufacturing systems following a knowledge management approach. The proposed knowledge based framework facilitates the definition, storage and extraction of past knowledge in terms of production line layouts. Semantics technology and artificial intelligence approaches such as inference rules and similarity measurement are the main pillars of the framework. The knowledge based framework is integrated within a greater framework, virtual factory framework that allows the knowledge extraction from a series of software tools used during the whole factory lifecycle. The concept and the implementation is tested in the early design of a steel fabrication line case study.

Virtual Factory: An Integrated Framework for Manufacturing Systems Design and Analysis

Competitive manufacturing companies have to effectively deal with the concurrent evolution of products, processes and production systems. This problem, known as Co-evolution, can be addressed only through the integrated use of different methodologies, provided that the digital tools implementing these methodologies can interoperate properly and effectively. This paper presents the concept of an integrated framework to support the interoperability between digital factory tools and shows how it can benefit the business processes along the whole factory life-cycle.

Enabling Energy Management for Planning Energy-efficient Factories

Due to the reasons of sustainability, energy efficiency becomes a more and more important objective for industrial companies. Among others, the term “energy management” is often mentioned as a practical instrument to raise energy efficiency. Because of the long-term influence at an early stage of the factory life cycle, factory planning provides an important contribution to realize company goals regarding energy efficiency. Until now, there is a lack of methodical concepts considering the combination of energy management and factory planning. In this paper, the interaction between both of these topics is described and by this, the meaning of energy management as an integral part of energy-efficient factories is underlined. Generally, energy management is used in the phase of factory operation to improve the energy performance, including energy efficiency, energy supply security, energy use and energy consumption. Besides, the integration of energy-related tasks in the factory planning process should also be realized as far as possible, e.g. regarding the purchase, distribution, storage and use of energy. This leads to a more systematic and holistic consideration of energy efficiency in organizational and technical processes of a company.

Zero Defect Manufacturing: A Product and Plant Oriented Lifecycle Approach

The EU project IFaCOM has the objectives to achieve near zero defect level of manufacturing for all kinds of manufacturing. The IFaCOM focus on feedback loops for the zero defect manufacturing approaches is within the shop floor and the manufacturing related activities. Both real-time and knowledge based loops are covered. Zero defect manufacturing also has an extended life cycle oriented process focus. In addition a combination or integrated view to the product and factory life cycle models is important.This paper will focus on a part and plant lifecycle approach to achieve the best possible practice to zero defect manufacturing. Descriptions of which data or indicators that can be necessary to collect from the processes and where in the product lifecycle they can be used for improvements are important issues. It is also required to follow both the lifecycle for the manufactured product and the lifecycle for the plant that perform the manufacturing. This includes development and descriptions of a framework for an integrated product-plant lifecycle model. Advanced enterprise modeling methods and tools (e.g. GERAM) are important architectures for such a framework.The manufacturing phase of the lifecycle is the central part, but feedback to design, engineering, in addition to information flows to maintenance and recycling are important to cover all issues to perform zero defect manufacturing. The Enterprise model architectures are extended to cover the needs for a Zero Defect Lifecycle oriented integrated plant- product model.

A Holistic Management Model for Manufacturing Companies and Related IT Support

Life cycle and management concepts are a necessity to compete in current turbulent markets. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) struggle when realizing such concepts and accordant IT support. In this paper we review different concepts and their similarities and differences are discussed. We focus on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Chain Management and Factory Lifecycle Management to integrate them into a holistic management model. Subsequently, we extend a service-based PLM architecture to support the holistic management model to continuously support processes. The usage of standardized technologies allows companies, and especially SMEs, to implement this architecture with low costs and effort.