Identification of potentials in the context of Design for Industry 4.0 and modelling of interdependencies between product and production processes

Abstract Industry 4.0 offers great potentials for improving production systems and processes, as well as the product itself regarding quality and time-to-market. The majority of research in the context of Industry 4.0 focuses on typical production topics like reducing waste, increasing flexibility or increasing lead times. The focus in this work however, lies on the identification of Industry 4.0 potentials on the product considering its interdependencies with the production system. The identification and modelling of interdependencies between product functions, product embodiment with its features, production processes and the production system supports engineers and product developers in a variety of ways. Therefore, a method is developed to evaluate the impact and risk of changes on the product or process side, respectively to the dependent systems or processes. In this contribution, the model PGE - Product Generation Engineering is used to identify Industry 4.0 potentials in the product and production system and to estimate the impact and risk of their implementation. The approaches "Design for Industry 4.0" and “Design with Industry 4.0” are supported with the mentioned method. The occuring information from different domains is modelled and connected with approaches from Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE). This supports the product developer to handle the complexity in a project considering product and production system development in the early stages of development activities. Thus, this paper is a contribution to the inclusion of production systems and industry 4.0 technologies in the product development process.