Aligning the product, factory and ICT life cycles: Challenges and opportunities

Manufacturing companies are subject to permanently changing environments. The factories have to be continuously adapted to stay sustainable and competitive in the global market. As a result, today's factories are characterized by evolved structures not only in terms of the factory structure with its production resources but also of the supporting information and communication technologies (ICT). Additionally the products to be produced have to be considered, because they are one of the most influencing objects in manufacturing companies. A complicating fact is that objects of these three categories have their own life cycles that usually differ in their respective ranges and specificities. As a basis for supporting these companies throughout the whole life cycle of factories including the products to be produced and the used ICT, the single life cycles have to be understood with regard to their respective objects and interrelations and they have to be aligned to maximize further optimization potentials. The contribution presented here offers a fundament as a possibility to align these three life cycles with the employment of a knowledge-based, multi-scale modeling approach, called Factory DNA. Therefore the model of the DNA double helix, from the field of biology, is adapted to comprehend and visualize the different life cycles as an interrelated triple helix. After emphasizing the potential and the requirements for the alignment of these three different life cycles an overview of the state of the art regarding the product, factory and ICT life cycles is given. In a further step the main challenges regarding their alignment and the derived opportunities are presented. The paper concludes with the approach for the alignment of the product, factory and ICT life cycles, called Factory DNA.