Anticipating VUCA by Utilizing the Potential of Technological and Logistical Degrees of Freedom

Facing increased market volatility necessitates robustness and flexibility to mitigate short-term disruptions and transformability to adjust to long-term changes. The degrees of freedom available for (re-)acting in this environment are determined by product requirements, production system characteristics, and production control system flexibility. The often-found sequential and decoupled consideration of technological and logistical decisions provides a narrow action space, resulting in limited flexibility. Production control with integrated consideration of logistical and technological degrees of freedom has the potential to increase flexibility by opening up the decision space. So far, research in this context is focused on job shop environments. Aiming to extend this integrated consideration to production systems with other characteristics, this article proposes a method to identify available degrees of freedom and introduces an approach to quantify their potential to mitigate the effects of company-specific turbulence patterns through a daydreaming-enhanced digital twin.