Flexibilitätsoptimierung zur Auslastungssteigerung im Automobilrohbau

This dissertation is aimed at practitioners from producing companies. It supports companies in the optimal utilization of the economic potential that is offered by flexibility of manufacturing systems.The producing industry has to cope with an increasing number of market niches and decreasing sales volumes. In addition, there are substantial planning uncertainties. The flexibilization of manufacturing systems seems to be a promising possibility to guarantee cost efficient production under these circumstances. The challenge is to be able to react to unstable demand and at the same time to make the production of similar products or of successor products on the same production lines possible; the investment for manufacturing systems is to be redeemed by as many products produced as possible.Increased flexibility, however, often leads to higher investments and higher operating costs of manufacturing systems; this is relevant in particular for manufacturing systems requiring high investments, such as automotive body shops. Therefore, the benefit of flexibility investments has to be proven before implementation. Currently, however, there are no pragmatic methods available that permit to evaluate and optimize flexible manufacturing systems at an affordable cost and with reproducible and comprehensible results.Therefore, a method has been developed that quantifies and optimizes the flexibility of different production concepts along with its benefits. It supports both production planners and decision takers in the planning of flexible manufacturing systems. The method has been developed taking the example of the automotive body shop; however, the results can be easily transferred to other, especially capital-intensive areas of manufacturing.Three modules form the core of the method: the collection of requirements and boundary conditions, the configuration and optimization of the manufacturing system considered, and simulation and evaluation.The method makes a quick and easy to use modeling of uncertain market expectations as well as of all relevant parameters of the manufacturing system and the corresponding cost functions possible early on in the planning process. Simulation results are then processed and presented in a form suitable for practical use. Especially the so-called flexibility window, an aggregated visualization of efforts for and benefits of flexibility that has been developed in this dissertation, is a valuable tool for analysis and presentation. It visualizes the results of planning uncertainties in an easily comprehensible form; it thus shows the main factors influencing a flexibility decision and is a substantial support for decision takers. This makes explicit flexibility decisions on executive level possible and prevents implicit decisions taken on lower decision levels – and, mostly, against flexibility.A user friendly IT tool facilitates the application of the planning methodology and enables body shop planners to very quickly and easily model body shop concepts, to evaluate them against concrete flexibility requirements, to optimize them and to compare them to alternative concepts. Subsequently, the profitability of the different concepts can be visualized concisely. The IT tool thus facilitates optimal investment decisions.Plausibility and validity of the developed method have been verified and demonstrated in a real-life application example at DaimlerChrysler AG