Economic evaluation of manufacturing process sequences under consideration of potential component variants

Currently companies face the challenge that products and components change frequently, due to shortening product life cycles. This leads to the fact that manufacturing companies in series production have to produce different component variants over the useful life of a manufacturing process sequence. Due to the increasing number of different component variants to be produced over the useful life of a manufacturing process sequence future component variants and the resulting requirements for production must be integrated into production planning. As a contribution to solve this challenge a new approach for the economic evaluation of manufacturing process sequences is presented, which enables the integration of potential, uncertain component variants into the planning of manufacturing process sequences. In addition, the methodology developed is applied to a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the development results.