Monitoring and control of production processes based on key performance indicators for mechatronic systems

The processes for manufacturing and operating modern technical products require expertise in multiple disciplines like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering. Assessing the current condition and quality of these processes and the machines involved is challenging due to the inherent complexity of the products and the required expertise in multiple engineering domains. Globalization and increasing competition make it necessary to reduce production costs while at the same time ensuring high throughput and product quality. Without the ability to precisely assess the condition and quality of production processes and involved machines, taking action to steer these metrics is nearly impossible and results in unnecessary high production costs. In our previous publications, we introduced the concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for mechatronic systems as a concept to assess the condition and quality of products and production processes in a graspable yet substantial and efficient way. In this paper, we further refine our KPI concepts und evaluate them for two different use cases: we apply our KPI concept to a manufacturing process in the mechatronic system domain and an operation process in the food production domain. We provide detailed insights in how we applied our concepts within these domains and report about lessons learned. In addition, we provide a business case estimation for our software solution that assesses the KPIs of our food production domain example.