Robotics, Automation, Networking
A first prototype for production is a good start. However the road to batch production is a long one. Targeted ramp-up management has become more important than ever with the necessity to save time and costs. In the end it's about the availability of building components on schedule, the ideal implementation of staff, and the perfect implementation of machines.
At the Ramp-Up Graduate School nine institutes from various faculties at RWTH Aachen University are developing methods together to reduce the instabilities that occur during production ramp-up. The graduate school, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, is organizing the third "International Conference on Ramp-Up Management," ICRM for short, which deals with the current developments in these topics, which are becoming increasingly important in industry.
National and international experts will experience an extraordinary, interactive and interdisciplinary conference from June 22 to 24, 2016, at the Smart Logistics Cluster at RWTH Aachen Campus. The conference will also include a "World Café Debate," in which controversial hypotheses will be discussed. Over the three days central aspects also include complexity management, organizational learning, robotics and automation, and networking. "RWTH Aachen offers the ideal structures to be integrated into holding such a conference," explains professor Robert Schmitt, speaker of the Graduate School and conference organizer. The program includes a workshop at the Fab Lab Aachen, Germany's first fabrication laboratory, and a tour through the demonstration factory, where the electric vehicles produced in Aachen, the e.Go Life and e.Go Kart, are produced, for example.
With its Aachen model the Ramp-Up Graduate School has developed an approach for interdisciplinary ramp-up management that is receiving great attention. When developing the model, they evaluated a dataset of 71 companies from 2004. It was clear how important the targeted coordination was of all processes and decisions in the ramp-up phase of a production. With the ICRM the Graduate School is beginning a new empirical study on the topic "Ramp-Up Management Against the Backdrop of Industry 4.0."
Graduate School
Graduate schools are university institutions intended to promote junior researchers and offer a particular form of doctoral qualification. They are supported by about ten professors and offer doctoral candidates networked research work on a superior research topic. This is then supplemented with a structured qualification program.
Source: Press and Communications