Value Stream Kinematics

Abstract

The trend towards individualized products and the increasing demand for a greater variety of variants create new challenges for existing production environments and require a re-thinking of production. Established manufacturing systems that provide the desired flexibility are associated with significant productivity restrictions and are therefore unable to compete economically with production from rigid production lines. They are therefore often limited to serving niche markets. Consequently, an approach is needed that combines high productivity with high flexibility. For this purpose, this paper presents a new approach to manufacturing with an equally high productivity and flexibility, so-called value stream kinematics. The basic idea of value stream kinematics is to combine the advantages of specialized machines with the versatility of industrial robots. The vision behind this is to be able to realize entire value streams with uniform robot-like kinematics and no need for special machines.