Development of Digital Shadows for Production Control

Abstract

Production controllers have to make short-term decisions on the adjustment of production processes. Existing IT systems do not fully meet the information needs and functional requirements of production controllers and provide insufficient support for the decision-making process. The idea of Digital Shadows addresses this challenge by providing the user with the relevant information for a specific purpose consequently supporting the process of decision-making. This is achieved by linking, aggregating and analyzing production data from various sources. In this paper, an approach for the development of Digital Shadows for production control is presented. The approach comprises the three levels of Digital Shadows for production control: 1) data offers, 2) information requirements and 3) analysis methods. To describe the data offers, the relevant data and data sources identified and categorized. The information requirements are derived from the decisions in production control. To link the data offers and information requirements the relations between the data and the tasks of production control are modeled. At the analysis methods level, existing production control analysis methods are examined and categorized. Additionally, an approach for the application of the analysis methods to the data is explored. The approach for the development of Digital Shadows was further on applied in order to create an exemplary Digital Shadow for production control.