Employing Order Allocation Flexibility in Cyber-physical Production Systems

One of the main goals of Industrie 4.0 research is to enable the usage of so far unutilized flexibility potentials in production and logistics. While Industrie 4.0 research generally considers most flexibility types, such as material handling flexibility, machine flexibility and operation flexibility, order allocation flexibility in particular is so far rarely investigated. Order allocation flexibility describes the flexibility potential that occurs when half-finished goods are not assigned to a specific customer order in a production system employing the make-to-order strategy, but instead can be freely assigned to any order that might require this half-finished good with its current specifications. Furthermore, this allocation from half-finished goods to orders might even change during the production process. Employing order allocation flexibility directly increases the degree of freedom for the other aforementioned flexibility types and has therefore already found application in the production of customer specific goods, e.g. in the form of a multi-phased order release in the automotive industry. In this context, cyber physical production systems with their capability of self-optimization and control theoretically offer the possibility to determine the allocation of half-finished goods to orders in near real time during any production step, leading to a further increase of flexibility in the overall production system. This work contributes to the state of the art in Industrie 4.0 research by first analyzing the potentials of a stronger consideration of order allocation flexibility into Industrie 4.0 enabled production systems and discussing the compatibility of existing research approaches with this flexibility type. Second, a conceptual model for production planning and control employing order allocation flexibility in a cyber-physical production system will be derived.