Flexibility oriented design of production systems

The necessity of fulfilling customer requests leads to challenges for the production departments of manufacturing enterprises because a high product variety has to be managed at the same time with a high speed of order changes. If this variability cannot be compensated with sufficient process flexibility this will lead to an instable situation. Therefore a methodology would be very helpful which is able to analyze the necessary flexibility demand. The analysis of flexibility demand is crucial for the design of production systems. The objective must be to define the degree of flexibility that it is able to fulfill market demands. In the contribution a concept is presented for the flexibility oriented design of production systems which is derived from the management of energy supply and power plants. In order to work out the energy production in energy supply systems the demand is classified in certain zones: basic, middle and peak load. For each level a different production strategy is applied. Our central idea is to classify the demand in production regarding its variety in different classes in order to enable a differentiated capacity budgeting and to derive the optimal degree of flexibility.