Modeling production workflows in a mass customization era

Future manufacturing systems are required to be adaptable and react quickly on changes in markets and demands. Additionally, they should be able to support individualized products that are tailored to customer needs. Flexibility can be increased through decoupling product descriptions from manufacturing systems. Production processes are no longer described based on available resources. Instead, a generic description with all required parameters is defined once and later used with different factory setups. We propose a list of parameters and information that should be included in such a generic product description. Afterwards, we define possible structures for product descriptions that can typically occur in manufacturing systems. We evaluate the approach on an experimental setup used for educational purposes.