Design and Application of a Digital Factory Model for Factory Restructuring

Factory planning has the task of designing products, plants, processes and the building of a factory. The requirements to the factory planning and the building concerned have changed in the last years. Regular restructuring gains more importance in order to maintain the competitiveness of a factory. Restrictions regarding new areas, shorter life cycles of product and production technology as well as a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity) world cause more frequently occurring restructuring measures within a factory. The interfaces between factory planning and building planning are crucial in conversion processes to optimally meet the new requirements of a factory building and to react to short-term adjustments. Because of the high adaptation rate of factories described above, a methodology for restructuring factory buildings based on an up-to-date digital factory model is conceived and designed for practical application in factory restructuring projects. The emphasis is on decision making in building conversion processes of factory buildings. The aim is to shorten the decision-making process on the construction site. This requires the application of a methodology that reduces the deficits of the existing approaches. Finally, it will be shown how to best use the digital factory model in practice. It is about designing a mobile application to meet the needs of factory planners on site. An Augmented Reality (AR) application is designed and created with focus to the UI to provide decision support for planning variants. The time and cost expenditure are represented in the AR tablet solution based on a Building Information Model (BIM).