Understanding product state relations within manufacturing processes

Abstract

Today's manufacturing industry is forced to constantly improve its processes in order to stay competitive in a global market. Already highly optimized in many cases, academics and practitioners must identify furthur optimization potential by taking a closer look at the manufacturing process line. Within this paper, the product state based view is briefly introduced as a theoretical basis for the following analysis of relations between product state characteristics along the manufacturing process chain. First, the difference of dependencies and interdependencies are established through a time and process perspective. Possible dependencies are then classified, including theoretical examples. Concluding the paper, the requirements for a mapping of state characteristics are shown and possible opportunities of the presented approach are discussed. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.