InnoCyFer

Brief description

The InnoCyFer project is developing a web-based open-innovation platform. This platform will provide customers with a toolkit that allows them to design products, within the scope of what is technically feasible, individually and according to their own ideas without the need for specific skills. Unique new autonomous production planning and control methods will be developed to manufacture these custom-innovated products. The methods will be based on flexible and adaptive forms of organisation found in biology. In this way, jobs can be planned at short notice and requests for changes can be permitted at late phases in the production process.

Challenge

It is becoming increasingly possible for consumers to have their design requests implemented. For instance, when it comes to configuring a new car, it is now possible to adapt the product within precisely defined limits to one's own wishes and ideas. More and more customers, however, are calling for an even greater degree of customisation. They want to directly influence the design and function of the product. However, this requires new infrastructures and extremely flexible production lines that allow customer wishes to be implemented at short notice and enable changes to be permitted at very late phases of the product development process.

Aim

As part of the InnoCyFer project, an open-innovation platform is to be developed that will allow the creative and innovative potential of customers to be integrated into the product development process. The platform will be networked with a new type of planning and control for an autonomous manufacturing system. This will make highly customised and flexible production possible along with a high number of variants and low quantities. The innovation potential of customers can also be used by manufacturers to develop new products and designs.

Technologies

Using a web-based, open-innovation platform, customers can create a completely new design or adapt existing designs to their own wishes or ideas. The customised designs can then be published on the open-innovation platform in order to receive other ideas, solutions to problems or opinions from other customers. The manufacturer also informs the customer via the open-innovation platform as to whether the customised product is actually feasible, the expected delivery period and the cost of the product.

One special feature of bionic production control is that the manufacturing system flexibly adapts to the respective customer jobs without any interruption in operations. The customer can modify, in as far as possible and at short notice, jobs already initiated right up into late production phases. This is to be made possible by "bionic production control" within the entire value chain which will ensure a high degree of flexibility and simple intervention combined with low error tolerance and a low degree of complexity.
Nature serves as the model here, for instance, where ants, without central control, collectively master complex tasks by marking scent trails. This kind of self-control is now to be used in industry so that production lines can be decentrally organised and scalable as required. Machines, parts, products, workers, planning and control components are the individual "ants" which communicate with each other via "digital scent trails". Depending on the exterior conditions (customer requests, material stocks, machine utilisation and availability, suppliers, job priority), the overall system continuously reorganises without the need for a central planning authority – just like the ant colony.

Use case

The example of a customised coffee machine is used to demonstrate the path from the standardised to the customised products.

Members of Consortium: TU München (Konsortialführer), Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH, Festo Didactic GmbH & Co. KG, Fraunhofer IWU, HYVE Innovation Community GmbH