Technical Intelligence for Manufacturing

Up to now companies focussed their development and usage of flexible manufacturing systems mainly on the automation of the systems functions and the peripheral subsystems like transport and logistics. The main objective of this developments was to increase the technical and organizational utilization rates in the single and small batch production. Additional future potentials of manufacturing systems are to activate by operations in the extreme fields of technologies like high speed, high volume and high precision. In this fields of operations the process management will become the critical success factor just in view of high performance and zero defects. The change drivers of future manufacturing systems are again the elctronic based technologies including virtual engineering, sensors and actuators as well as methods of the information processing like artificial neural networks and their integration to autonomous control and active exploration. The digital intelligence gives rise to scope for new areas of potential for adding value across the entire manufacturing chain which could be activated by the manufacturers over the whole product life cycle.