Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IISWith ongoing digitization, the market requirements of manufacturing companies are rising constantly. Besides production requests, the desire of transparent and optimized material flow processes increases steady aswell. However the tasks of interal logistics are becoming more complex due to the growing individualisation of products, for example with custom-builts in small batch-sizes. Especially the affected physical processes are often not digitalized to the extend of surveying the process easily. Thus the big optimization potenital of material flow control is not exploited to its full extend.
moderne Produktion
High variability, small batch sizes and much flexibility
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ProCheck - Verification of internal material flow processes with CPS-based Process Mining
Individual production with Process Mining
An inefficient process flow, especially with small-scale manual production processes, common for SME, can lead to delays, insufficient capacity of ressources or unsatisfactory quality. Because of that your own efficiency and potential cannot be exploited to its full extend.
The aim of ProCheck is to enable automatic and continuous analysis as well as the optimization and inspection of material flow processes in such production processes. The focus here is on the spatially distributed processing and assembly steps of individual oders, to minimize costs, improve quality and shorten lead times.
Optimization with Innovation
As part of the ProCheck project, manufacturing SMEs have the opportunity to use process mining methods for their physical material flow processes for the first time. Process mining refers to analysis techniques for collecting, checking and optimizing processes using automatically recorded data traces. By using cyber-physical systems (CPS), which are used to collect sensory data in the processes, the database - called event logs - shall be created for process mining using a new type of data processing. This means logistics processes of manufacturing SMEs that have not been digitized so far can be optimized and analyzed.
When implementing the innovative approach, the ProCheck project draws on the knowledge available in Fraunhofers IIS' research area of Positioning and Networks on specially researched and developed wireless positioning and networking technologies for Industrial Internet of Things applications, as well as the various technology platforms for the implementation of CPS.
Strengthening your Competitiveness
The benefits that ProCheck will bring are obvious. Through an automatic and continuous analysis and the underlying optimization of the material flow, reaction time to specific customer requests can be shortend and smaller batch sizes as well as an increased process efficiency and effectiveness can be realised flexibly, by means of individualized processes. By participating in ProCheck, manufacturing SMEs receive the opportunity of improving their individual position in the market and generate higher customer satisfaction.