Life cycle engineering and management - fostering the management-orientation of life cycle engineering activities

Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) is a promising approach for directing engineering activities towards sustainability. Although LCE includes not only technical and ecological but also economic target figures, management-orientation is rather limited and issues affecting the success of innovation processes are neglected. This is shown based on a literature review. For contributing towards closing this gap, this paper presents suggestions to foster the market-, customer-, and supply chain-orientation of LCE: its extension by business modeling and integration with Target Costing. Elements of these approaches are illustrated by the research activities of the Cluster of Excellence MERGE

Multidimensional Analysis of Process Chains Regarding the Resource-efficient Manufacturing of Hybrid Structures

AbstractOne of the leading topics in the automotive industry as well as in the aircraft and aerospace sector is the use of lightweight structures for weight reduction. For this purpose, hybrid materials, e.g. metal-plastic structures, are of essential importance. Despite the high technological challenge, the manufacturing techniques still provide versatile development potential. Especially the integration of separate production techniques in one single tool opens new possibilities of successfully designing a resource-efficient process chain for hybrid components, suitable for series production.Within the Cluster of Excellence “MERGE Technologies for Multifunctional Lightweight Structures”, a modelling approach for the resource-efficient process design of the manufacturing of hybrid structures, which is based on a multidimensional analysis, will be developed. Besides the technical optimisation, the energy efficiency, the cost-effectiveness, the robustness of process chains as well as the maturity regarding series production will be considered during the entire development process. The paper will present main features of this modelling approach including a proposal for a systematic and structured procedure of a multidimensional analysis