Model of a factory structure under changeability aspects in automotive manufacturing

The complexity in automotive manufacturing increased enormously in the last couple of years. Reasons therefore are due to a widened product portfolio, enlarged manufacturing capacities distributed over several manufacturing sites and a large number of suppliers feeding the manufacturing network around the world. The factories are under permanent change and must be planned, configured and adapted in a permanent way. Consequently, planning tasks go along with a comparable degree of complexity as the manufacturing itself and must stand the continuous change manufacturing is faced with. Therefore, a factory model representing the essential information about the products, the technological resources and their interdependencies must be built for planning purposes. In context of long-term strategic planning tasks, structural changes are in specific focus and must be considered in the model. In this paper, a model of a factory structure, which can be used for the strategic planning of a manufacturing network is proposed. The factory structure model is based on a current configuration and has the architecture to consider future change within forecasts and scenarios.