Högskolan i Skövde

To shift the focus from a reactive development approach to a purely proactive approach is a comprehensive and decisive challenge. Reconfigurable manufacturing principles offer a new perspective that emphasizes adaptability over obsolescence. This paper aims to explore how automotive industries include reconfigurability and circularity in production system design to prolong the production system lifetime. In a multiple case study within automotive industry the long-term view in machining system development has been investigated. The results show that the companies try to leave the linear approach behind to look beyond the specific project boundaries and enable a system to be reused over time. There is an awareness of the importance to adopt long-term approaches to achieve a circular mindset and the study reveals that machining systems are characterized by a higher flexibility and higher degree of standardization to enable turbulence in requirements. Still, there are methods required to consider future needs, strategies, and technologies to enable reconfigurable and circular systems. 

Increasingly volatile and complex manufacturing environments make the continuous development of engineering professionals’ knowledge and competences in changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing a major source of competitiveness in manufacturing companies. Enablers of this include modular and platform-based product and manufacturing system design, as well as industry 4.0 related technologies and digitalisation. Therefore, this paper focuses on Continuing Engineering Education (CEE) in changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing and investigates the implications of applying a university-industry collaborative approach to Problem-based Learning (PBL) for CEE in company-settings. The paper builds on a four-year CEE initiative from Swedish manufacturing industry and includes insights from implementing a CEE course in changeable manufacturing, which was designed based on PBL principles and run as an industry-university cooperation for four consecutive years. Implications addressed in the paper relates to (1) PBL as a suitable approach for CEE, (2) Research transfer to industry through PBL-based CEE, and (3) industry-university collaboration for CEE, which provides valuable insights on how to conduct successful CEE in knowledge fields that are fast evolving in order to enable fast industry transitions. # 2023 TEMPUS Publications.

The traditional way of developing production systems is often limited by merely considering an imminent new product. The longevity of a production system’s lifecycle is at risk following this approach and may create a focus on the current functionality and capacity rather than on fulfilling future product requirements. Changeable production address this challenge, however, support for production engineers to consider more changeable solutions is lacking. Thus, this paper proposes support for evaluating production capabilities and mapping how new products may impact the production system. The support is developed in two industrial cases which studied current production capabilities and future requirements put on two automatic assembly lines. The support allows for estimates of the cost of repurposing the assembly lines to accommodate the new products and paves the way for seeing beyond the dedicated manufacturing paradigm towards increased levels of changeable production.

A well-performing product realisation process in order to introduce new products with high frequency to a low cost, is becoming more of a pre-requisite for manufacturing companies. In a multiple case study, this paper investigates applied industrial practices in production development to support the production realisation process and reports on the current ways of working and challenges therein. The areas of current production development practices, production platforms, standardised work, and knowledge development are explored. Identified challenges towards long-term production development based on the explored areas are presented. The inclusion of future need of production system adaptions from future products is argued for to increase its efficiency. Through including future need of the production system, the notion of considering one product at the time during industrialisation is challenged and a more proactive perspective can be taken. The production platform approach is considered as one enabler for such an improved production development.

The product realisation process is one of several formalized supports for industrial actors to excel in concurrent engineering procedures. To satisfy customers today mass customization is increasingly in need, requiring delicate modular architectures, both in product designs and production. Emerging is also the digitalized co-platforming era of automating the synchronization of product and production platforms. Yet, in all these processes, humans as agents have different roles, objectives, and mental models that governs their decision-making, being the bearer of separate ideas on what to optimize from their end. In product development large sensitivity is given to customer demands and trends to design attractive products, while less attention may be placed on evaluating the increase of variation into the production flows from new products, potentially increasing the workload and complexity of assembly systems, as well as, the subsequent material logistics. In production, much effort is invested to increase standardization, increase the pace, and minimize the manufacturing cost, with the objective to minimize required changes to the current production system. Consequently, it is a hard problem to satisfy all criteria at once, and how to solve it has no clear answer. Therefore, this study has applied qualitative System Dynamics modelling, also often referred to as systems thinking, to investigate how these opposing views were represented at an industrialized house builder. The purpose was to explore and model the perspectives and mental models of two leading roles to model their conflicting objectives. As a result, an overall model of main interactions of product and production development is proposed to support interpreting the findings, visualize the identified conflicting dynamics, and work as a vehicle for analysis.

Nowadays customer needs are changing rapidly, resulting in shorter product life cycles and a need for a higher product introduction rate. This requires manufacturers to introduce new products whilst keeping production efficiency at a satisfactory level and production costs low. Based on these challenges, there is a need to consider both production efficiency and potential assembly line investment costs during the planning of new product introductions. Hence, this paper aims to support decision-making regarding whether to introduce and produce a new product in an already existing assembly line or to invest in a new assembly line. To its support, a tool which illustrates how to support manufacturing investment decisions through line balancing techniques has been developed. The tool was based on theoretical findings from two literature reviews, investigating assembly line balancing techniques and assembly line investment costs, and through data collected in a single case study, including how a company is currently supporting investment decisions and performing line balancing. The case study was conducted with a large Swedish company from the automotive industry. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, document studies and a focus group. The proposed decision-supporting tool conducts line balancing for both combined and separate assembly lines, and converts the results into costs. These costs are then compared with the potential investment costs of either producing in an already existing assembly line or investing in a new assembly line. The final output is a summarization of the potential costs related to both alternatives which provides the user with the most economically beneficial alternative by taking both production efficiency and investment costs into consideration.

Production platforms can be considered as the foundation for the design, development, and reconfiguration of a production system. Even though, the product platform domain has been extensively researched and applied widely in practice, this is not the case in the production domain regarding production platforms and reconfigurable production systems. Therefore, this paper reviews the current product and production platform literature to distinguish the production platform co-development research. A systematic literature review has been carried out to explore the concept of production platforms and pinpoint what research gaps that needs to be bridged.

To increase changeability and reconfigurability of manufacturing systems, while maintaining cost-efficiency and environmental sustainability they need to be designed in accordance to the need for change. Since companies often need to convert existing manufacturing systems to handle variation, implementation of reconfigurable manufacturing systems calls for an analysis of the current system to understand to what extent they fulfil reconfigurability characteristics. This requires an assessment of the needs for reconfigurability as well as assessment of the existing ability to reconfigure the manufacturing system. Although a lot of reconfigurable manufacturing system assessment models are proposed in theory there is an evident knowledge gap pertaining to what extent the existing systems in the industry are in achieving reconfigurability. The purpose with this paper is to propose an assessment criterion for existing manufacturing systems to measure reconfigurability and their readiness to change with respect to products and volume variations. Based on a literature review of existing reconfigurability assessment models and a case study within the automotive industry, a criterion is developed and tested to analyze how reconfigurable a system is and to decide which parameters that need more attention to achieve higher degree of reconfigurability. © 2019 The Authors.