Bernd Scholz-Reiter

University of Bremen | Uni Bremen

Manufacturing and logistic service companies are increasingly confronted with high dynamics and complexity. Due to its particular suitability for short-term and situation-dependent decision-making, autonomous control can improve planning and control of production and related transportation processes. This chapter gives an overview of the research t...

Trucking companies deliver a large number of containers every day to container terminals at hub ports. Truck drivers for the delivery operation can experience long waiting times when they arrive at peak hours. This study proposes a scheduling method for appointments that considers the cost of trucks staying in the terminal, demurrage cost, containe...

Due to the development of Cyber-Physical Production Systems, autonomous control of manufacturing processes is of increasing significance. Particularly, these manufacturing control approaches have considerable potential in job shop manufacturing. However, research in this field tends to focus on subtasks of manufacturing control without considering...

In general, rental articles circulate in closed logistic systems between the lender and one or more dynamically changing customers. The planning processes, related to the allocation of those articles to customer orders, are a challenging task. This is especially the case, if orders have a close temporal distance, as the corresponding order executio...

A container port is a crucial interface between the maritime and the hinterland transportation. In order to improve this interface, joint efforts between truck companies and a port terminal operator are necessary. However, a port terminal operator should transfer containers onto inland trucks responding to unexpected arrivals of them. It causes tha...

In recent years, green logistics has received increasing interest due to the rise in greenhouse gases emission from transport operations. It is a promising approach to managing supply chain decisions to reduce environmental damages. Many models have been developed in the literature to study the environmental aspects of routing problems. However, th...

Finished vehicle logistics is facing different challenges. In order to cope with these challenges this article presents a case study, analysing a concept to improve finished vehicle logistics using radio frequency identification (RFID)-based and electronic product code information services (EPCIS). Within this case study, vehicles were identified a...

Autonomous control is a promising approach to cope with increasing dynamics in production environments. However, an important issue for the acceptance of autonomous control is the provision of a sufficient planning accuracy, e.g., regarding order sequences or workstation assignments. Therefore, transferring autonomous control into practical applica...

Fast and reliable industrial inspection is a main challenge in manufacturing scenarios. However, the defect detection performance is heavily dependent on manually defined features for defect representation. In this contribution, we investigate a new paradigm from machine learning, namely deep machine learning by examining design configurations of d...

Decentralised scheduling with dispatching rules is applied in many fields of production and logistics, especially in highly complex manufacturing systems. Since dispatching rules are restricted to their local information horizon, there is no rule that outperforms other rules across various objectives, scenarios and system conditions. In this paper,...

English version (German Version further down): Title: Cyber pysical production systems - Enhancement of productivity and flexibility by networking of intelligent systems in the factory. Within this contribution trends for the production in Germany are analyzed and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are identified as a promising approach to tackle future...

Autonomous control is an approach to cope with increasing complexity in production and logistics. Autonomous control methods are characterised by decentralised coordination of logistic objects in a heterarchical organisation structure. Autonomous objects themselves are capable of processing information in order to make and execute decisions on thei...

Forschung und Entwicklung im Bereich von Industrie 4.0 bedeutet, vielversprechende Schnittstellen zwischen den zahlreichen unterschiedlichen Systemen zu erkennen und umzusetzen. Dabei müssen stets die Interoperabilität der Schnittstellen, die Aussagekraft der Modellierung sowie die Qualität der Daten berücksichtigt werden. Voraussetzung hierfür ist...

This paper answers two fundamental questions concerning the usage of the shifting bottleneck (SB) procedure to optimize the criterion total weighted tardiness for the classical job shop scheduling problem. The first question is how to configure the SB procedure, as it is a divide-and-conquer method and consists of diverse subsolutions for each proc...

Manufacturing companies are confronted with increasing dynamics and complexity. Commonly used central planning approaches provide a high planning accuracy, but are predominantly suitable for the application in rather static production environments. In contrast, autonomous control methods are a promising approach to cope efficiently with dynamic inf...

Manufacturing companies are confronted with increasing market volatility. They have to cope with rapidly changing customer demands concerning product types, quantities and delivery dates. Production planning and control must compensate the resulting fluctuations in capacity demand. In this context, capacity control is an effective measure to ensure...

Production planning and control faces increasing uncertainty, dynamics and complexity. Autonomous control methods proved themselves as a promising approach for coping with these challenges. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the interaction between autonomous control and precedent functions of production planning and control. In partic...

Die situationsabhängige Steuerung produktionslogistischer Prozesse ist im Kontext von Industrie 4.0 von zunehmender Bedeutung. Dem steht in der Praxis die Anforderung der Einhaltung zentraler Planvorgaben entgegen. In diesem Fachbeitrag wird simulationsbasiert der Einfluss der Planorientierung autonomer und konventioneller Fertigungssteuerungsverfa...

The complexity and dynamics of logistic systems continuously increase. As a result, the established planning and control approaches reach their limits. This paper introduces a concept based on the paradigm of autonomous control that deals with the problems related to the resource allocation under complex and dynamic circumstances. At this, the pape...

Die situationsabhängige Steuerung produktionslogistischer Prozesse ist im Kontext von Industrie 4.0 von zunehmender Bedeutung. Dem steht in der Praxis die Anforderung der Einhaltung zentraler Planvorgaben entgegen. In diesem Fachbeitrag wird simulationsbasiert der Einfluss der Planorientierung autonomer und konventioneller Fertigungssteuerungsverfa...

Demand planning is of significant importance for manufacturing companies since subsequent steps of production planning base on demand forecasts. Major tasks of demand planning are the selection of a prediction method and the configuration of its parameters subject to a given demand evolution. This paper introduces a novel method for the automated s...

In automated production processes grasping devices and methods play a crucial role in the handling of many parts, components and products. This keynote paper starts with a classification of grasping phases, describes how different principles are adopted at different scales in different applications and continues explaining different releasing strat...

This paper investigates the forecasting accuracy of different prediction methods based on the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems and phase space reconstruction. In particular, a locally linear regression method is described. Different regularization methods to achieve better predictions in case of short time series as well as to increase the rob...

The material flow in dynamically changing logistic systems underlies specific conditions, as destinations and stop-overs only exist temporarily. The order-dependent circulation of rental articles constitutes such a case, where the articles are on the move between the lender and one or more customers. The related planning and control processes are h...

A continuous trend to function integration, miniaturization and densification opens new opportunities in industry and research. To manufacture micro products, tools, materials and technologies have to be scaled down from the macro to the micro domain. Thereby, a downscaling of classical processes leads to unexpected process behavior, so called size...

Quality inspection is a standard process step in manufacturing processes and a lot of in situ measurement technology is available. Nevertheless, downscaling the dimension of the produced components to the micro domain requires new quality inspection and measurement technologies to acquire and analyze 2D texture and 3D shape information. In typical...

Apparel retail for fashion products has to cope with many different product variants, long transport distances for ready-made products, long production and delivery times, short product sales times and low demand predictability due to erratic end consumer behavior. The need to route large numbers of articles through the suppliers' distribution cent...

The integrated scheduling of production and transport systems is a NP-hard mixed-integer problem. This paper introduces a genetic algorithm (GA) that addresses this problem by decomposing it into combinatorial and continuous subproblems. The binary variables of the combinatorial subproblem form the chromosomes of each individual. Knowledge-based ev...

A rising trend to miniaturization and function integration requires new materials, tools, manufacturing setups and quality inspection strategies for mass production of micro mechanical systems (MMS). In most scenarios, quality inspection is carried out manually. An expert takes samples out of the manufacturing process and investigates them by means...

Purpose – In micro cold forming, the high degree of technological dependencies between manufacturing, quality inspection and handling technologies leads to an extremely complex planning of process chains. In addition, the lack of standardised processes and interfaces further complicates the planning. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/...

The availability of low-cost range sensors has led to several innovative implementations and solutions in various application fields like object recognition and localization, scene understanding, human-robot interaction or measurement of objects. The transfer of the corresponding methods and techniques to logistic processes needs the consideration...

Abstract Dispatching rules are frequently used for real-time, on-line scheduling in complex manufacturing systems. Design of such rules is usually done by experts in a time consuming trial-and-error process. Recently, evolutionary algorithms have been proposed to automate the design process. There are several possibilities to represent rules for th...

In micromanufacturing, a precise adjustment of manufacturing, handling, and quality control processes constitutes an essential factor for success. The continuing miniaturization of workpieces and production devices results in ever decreasing tolerances, whereas machines and processes become increasingly more specialized. Thereby, the so-called size...

Effiziente und robuste logistische Prozesse sind vor dem Hintergrund dynamischer Märkte und zunehmender Komplexität logistischer Systeme mit herkömmlichen Planungs- und Steuerungsmethoden immer schwieriger zu realisieren (Scholz-Reiter et al. Digital enterprises, production networks. Proceedings of the 37th CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturi...

Application of autonomous control for shop-floor scheduling by considering real-time control of material flows is advantageous to those assembly lines with dynamic and uncertain circumstances. Among several potential processors with computing and communication capabilities—for representing autonomous material carriers—wireless sensor nodes seem as...

The integrated problem of production and distribution scheduling is relevant in many industrial applications. Thus, many heuristics to solve this integrated problem have been developed in the last decade. Most of these heuristics use a sequential working principal or a single decomposition and integration approach to separate and solve subproblems....

The integrated problem of production and distribution scheduling is relevant for both industry and academia. Due to this relevance there has been an increasing body of literature in the last decade proposing a wide variety of problem solving methods. Almost every author presents algorithms based on models with individual parameters. Thus, the appli...

Die Fähigkeit zu kurzfristigen Kapazitätsanpassungen ist von entscheidender Bedeutung für eine hohe logistische Zielerreichung. Das Kapazitätsangebot und dessen Flexibilität werden von den Mitarbeitern, der Arbeitszeit und der technischen Ausstattung der Fertigung bestimmt. Davon ausgehend wird der Einsatz rekonfigurierbarer Werkzeugmaschinen für d...

The rising trend to miniaturization and function integration requires new materials, tools, process control and manufacturing strategies for mass production of micro components. To enable reliable processes, new micro and nano metrology methods for quality inspection are required, which resolve the conflict between measurement uncertainty, measurem...

The capability to conduct short-term capacity adjustments is highly important for the attainment of logistics objectives. The capacity supply and its flexibility are determined by labour deployment, working times and the technical equipment within a manufacturing system. This paper discusses the application of reconfigurable machine tools for the e...

The production of micro components has received much attention on the last years and has recently become one of the crucial tasks of product and processes oriented research. During the production of very small parts, many unanticipated manufacturing errors such as cracks, wrinkles and form deviations may occur. In order to minimize these defects (f...

The adoption of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in production networks enables new potential for improved efficiency, accountability, sustainability and scalability. In terms of production and transport processes, materialising this potential requires customised technological concepts, planning and control methods as well as business models. Even thou...

The performance of global manufacturing supply chains depends on the interaction of production and transport processes. Currently, the scheduling of these processes is done separately without considering mutual requirements, which leads to non- optimal solutions. An integrated scheduling of both processes enables the improvement of supply chain per...

Detecting surface defects is a challenging visual recognition problem arising in many processing steps during manufacturing. These defects occur with arbitrary size, shape and orientation. The challenges posed by this complexity have been combated with very special, runtime intensive and hand-designed feature representations. In this paper we prese...

Minimizing total weighted tardiness for job shops is a hard production scheduling problem. Shifting bottleneck (SB) procedures, which use a backtracking technique, can achieve excellent results for this problem. However, they usually require long computation times and do not scale well to larger problem instances of a realistic industrial size. In...

Kurzfassung Globale Trends wie die zunehmende Produktindividualisierung führen zusammen mit einer gestiegenen Marktvolatilität zu komplexen und dynamischen Produktionsabläufen, mit denen die Produktionsplanung und -steuerung (PPS) heute konfrontiert ist. Autonome Steuerungsmethoden ermöglichen in diesem Kontext eine hohe Reaktionsfähigkeit auf dyna...

Since early 90s the lean manufacturing system has become popular for industries. Following that, agility in production has got a great attention. Exploration of any new techniques for bringing these strategic concepts closer to each other has become advantageous for pioneer industries. Accordingly, the new paradigm of individual control, with the p...

The expansion of the scope and scale of products in the current business environments causes a continuous increase in complexity of logistics activities. In order to deal with this challenge in planning and control of logistics activities, several solutions have been introduced. One of the most latest one is the application of autonomy. The paradig...

The prediction of time series is an important task both in academic research and in industrial applications. Firstly, an appropriate prediction method has to be chosen. Subsequently, the parameters of this prediction method have to be adjusted to the time series evolution. In particular, an accurate prediction of future customer demands is often di...

Decentralized scheduling with dispatching rules is applied in many fields of production and logistics, especially in highly complex manufacturing systems, e.g. semiconductor manufacturing. Nevertheless, no dispatching rule outperforms other rules across various objectives, scenarios and system conditions. In this paper we present an approach to dyn...

Nowadays, markets are characterized by increasing dynamics and complexity. In particular, customer demands are often highly volatile. These conditions complicate demand forecasting and reduce the average accuracy of forecasting data. Nevertheless, manufacturing companies have to predict customer demands precisely, in order to achieve a well-founded...

Embedded control devices enhance logistic objects with the ability of decision making and execution and can increase the flexibility and robustness of logistic processes. While the influence of different autonomous control strategies on logistic performance has been investigated, an evaluation of a control devices’ influence is missing. This work a...

Unloading of standard containers within logistic processes is mainly performed manually. Amongst gripping technology, the development of a robot vision system for recognizing different shaped logistic goods is a major technical obstacle for developing robotic systems for automatic unloading of containers. Goods can be arbitrarily placed inside a co...

Multiclass queueing networks are an essential tool for modeling and analyzing complex supply chains. Roughly speaking, stability of these networks implies that the total number of customers/jobs in the network remains bounded over time. In this context robustness characterizes the ability of a multiclass queueing network to remain stable, if the ex...

In micro manufacturing, a precise adjustment of manufacturing, handling and quality control processes is an essential factor for success. The continuing miniaturization of work pieces and production devices results in ever decreasing tolerances. Thereby, so called size effect render the direct application of knowledge from the area of macro manufac...

The detection and pose estimation of various shaped objects in real world cluttered application scenarios is a major technical challenge due to noisy sensor data and possible occlusions. Usually, a predefined model database is utilized for implementing a robust and reliable object detection system. Geometric models based on superquadrics have shown...

Managing automotive supply chains becomes even more challenging, because vehicles are getting more complex and customers and production plants spread all over the world. To cope with this, the RAN – RFID-based Automotive Network project has developed a standardized platform for information exchange. Thus it is possible to develop and implement soft...

This paper presents a framework for the control of integrated production and transport systems by combining integrated scheduling with fault detection and analysis methods. A framework for the interplay of the scheduling with signal based fault detection and analysis methods is given by a simulation model of the supply chain.

Autonomous control strategies are a suitable concept in order to manage the dynamics of complex logistic systems in a decentralized manner. Previous research results show the advantage of autonomous control for scenarios in production logistics and in supply chain management. In each case, autonomous control was able to increase the flexibility, th...

The competition on global markets has changed towards a competition between supply chains instead of single competing companies. Thus, optimization approaches like integrated planning of production and outbound distribution comprise multiple companies within a supply chain. This paper provides requirements towards an integrated planning method and...

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for the integration of production and transport logistics in one original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and to compare its performance with a sequential procedure. Herein, delays in fulfilling delivery due dates in both non-disturbed and disturbed (with oscillating transport time) scenarios will be...

This contribution introduces the problem of batching and scheduling n jobs in non-permutation flow shops with m ≥ 2 batch processing machines in sequence and stage specific incompatible job families. Batches are build at each stage according to family-specific parameters. This creates a stage-interdependent batching and scheduling problem. We formu...

Recently, artificial neural networks have proven their potential in manifold production related tasks. At this, the learning ability is both their greatest strength and greatest weakness. The performance in the application is highly related to the learning process. Only sufficient training data in combination with a suitable configuration of the le...

This paper presents a review of using event management to deal with the uncertainties in production scheduling and transportation planning processes at the operational level. Moreover, it argues the importance of considering uncertainties and the application of event management in a collaborative production and transportation planning process at th...

Decentralized scheduling with dispatching rules is applied in many fields of logistics and production, especially in highly complex and dynamic scenarios, such as semiconductor manufacturing. Many dispatching rules are proposed in the literature, which perform well on specific scenarios. No rule is known, however, consistently outperforming all oth...

The automated handling of universal logistic goods through robotic systems requires suitable and reliable methods for categorizing different logistic goods. They must be able to detect the pose of different types and sizes of logistic goods in order to identify possible gripping points or for selecting a suitable gripping system for the detected ob...

By being able to calculate a machines remaining lifetime, event-driven maintenance actions can be initiated and scheduled ad-hoc into the existing working plan. Today’s maintenance management systems work mainly based on regular and cyclic services. This paper describes a new methodology to prioritize event-driven maintenance workloads driven by in...

The concept of collaboration is a widely used term throughout several scientific disciplines. During the last years, collaboration between distinct companies, involved in a supply chain or network gained importance. With an increasing specialisation into core competencies, and an increasing customer demand in terms of functionality and reliability,...

With the increasing importance of collaboration in supply networks, the number of so-called non-hierarchical supply chains or networks increases. Such networks are characterised by equally powered partners, who rely on each other in terms of highly specialised components or joint developments. Such non-hierarchical supply networks require a close c...

Alternative material flow strategies in logistics networks have crucial influences on the overall performance of the networks. Material flows can follow push, pull, or hybrid systems. To get the advantages of both push and pull flows in networks, the decoupling-point strategy is used as coordination mean. At this point, material pull has to get opt...

The design of efficient micro production process chains is one of the most challenging tasks in the product development process. Before a new product can be launched, the production process has to be designed by achieving the given volume and quality requirements. Thereby, a lot of interdependencies along these multistage manufacturing process chai...

Die integrierte Betrachtung von Pro-duktion und Logistik ist eine Möglichkeit, den Anforderungen globalisierter Märkte zu begegnen und die Konkurrenzfähigkeit von Lieferketten zu erhalten oder zu steigern. So vielfältig wie die unterschiedlichen Betrachtungsschwerpunkte und die daraus resultierenden Planungsmodelle sind auch die Verfahren zur Lösun...

Ongoing improvement of logistics and intermodal transport leads to high requirements regarding availability of machine resources like straddle carriers or gantry cranes. Accordingly, efficient maintenance strategies for port equipment have to be established. The change to condition-based maintenance strategies promises to save resources while enhan...

Optimized dispatching rules adapted to a certain logistic system are a new possibility to improve scheduling in logistic processes. This contribution presents the simulation library jasima. Its efficiency and customizability allows the creation of such rules also for complex production scenarios. We show the features of the simulation library and i...

Along export chains transportation has an important cost impacting directly on the efficiency of the whole chain. Experiments show satisfactory results in terms of reduced delivery time, increased productivity of transportation resources as well as economies of scale by the implementation of the Collaborative Transportation Management (CTM). In thi...

Im Bereich der Mikrofertigung spielt die exakte Abstimmung von Prozessparametern bei der Planung und der Konfiguration von Prozessketten eine besondere Rolle. Durch die Miniaturisierung von Werkstücken und Fertigungsanlagen werden immer geringere Toleranzen erforderlich. Zudem erschweren sogenannte Größeneffekte die Übertragung von Wissen aus der M...

Quality inspection within mass production of micro-parts is a big challenge due to manufacturing dimension and the need of suitable measurement and automated analysis systems. A main problem during micro manufacturing processes is the occurrence of surface imperfections. Automated detection of imperfections is often realised by analysing image data...

Kurzfassung Forschungsvorhaben finden oft über lange Zeiträume und in interdisziplinären Teams unterschiedlicher Institutionen statt. Die Projekte benötigen eine strukturierte Möglichkeit zur Erfassung und Weitergabe des dezentral generierten Wissens. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt Anforderungen an das Wissensmanagement in interdisziplinären Forschungsv...

Today, research is often conducted for long durations in interdisciplinary teams, consisting of members from different institutes and areas of expertise. Thereby, structured mechanics to manage the generated knowledge constitute a crucial factor of success. This article presents requirements for such a knowledge-management system, based on a case s...