Resilient Value Creation Systems (RESYST)

Motivation

The Covid 19 pandemic has brought the topic of resilience of value chains and production into focus. For many industries, the pandemic did not represent a so-called "black swan event", an unforeseeable event. Nevertheless, the serious consequences will be surprising for many companies. Especially in the early days, there was a lack of orientation and confidence to take action. There is a great need to learn from this crisis for future incidents and disasters, because resilience to incidents of all kinds is becoming a decisive competitive factor.

Project description

The project investigates how production systems can become more resilient. This requires "rethinking" production at all levels. This begins with new approaches to matrix production, continues with the planning and design of value-added and process chains, and extends to the implementation of adaptive, modular production systems and machine tools. Accordingly RESYST considers three clusters:  

  1.  "Resilience Management, Strategies and Infrastructures" with the aim to create an innovation contribution for internal company structures that allow for a resilient and cost-reducing risk management.
  2. "Planning and Operation of Resilient Production Processes" with the aim of developing solutions for challenges of cross-company production systems.
  3. "Resource-efficient production processes for increasing resilience" with the aim of analyzing the resilience contribution of additive and forming production processes and process engineering.

Project Tasks

Fraunhofer IMW scientists are working in Cluster 1 and are investigating how business models can be made more resilient in production. This requires activities in the resilience phases "anticipation", "coping" and "adaptation". The focus of the Leipzig research unit is on "anticipation". It is developing a framework that can act as an indicator or early warning system for crises and should help to stimulate the development of ideas for more resilient business models. 

Data-based solutions and future topics such as artificial intelligence and human-machine collaboration offer new potential to enable companies to develop resilient production processes and structures. In the framework, researchers are therefore collecting ideas for the use of technology for specific types of crises and steps in the value chain. The framework is filled and validated with the help of expert interviews within the Fraunhofer Group for Production. The results of the interviews are then incorporated into a management summary.

Client

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

Project Partner

Fraunhofer Group for Production

Project Duration

1.7.2020 - 31.12.2020

More information on the project