Design of demand-oriented flexible manufacturing process sequences under consideration of future and uncertain component variants

Manufacturing companies must increasingly produce different component variants. Thus, flexibility is becoming a success factor for manufacturing and must be considered in the planning of manufacturing process sequences (MPSs) to be successful. Since maximizing manufacturing flexibility results in additional costs, a demand-oriented consideration of flexibility is necessary to maximize the economic efficiency. For the planning of demand-oriented flexible MPSs, the integration of potential, uncertain component variants into the manufacturing planning is necessary, since these define the flexibility demand. The paper presents three challenges in the design of demand-oriented flexible MPSs. Furthermore, a concept for overcoming these challenges is outlined.