Requirements: Adaptable Production
Over the past decades, the market requirements posed to process industry production have fundamentally changed: Together with the increasing demand for customer-oriented product specialization, fluctuating procurement and sales markets result in ever shorter product life and innovation cycles; this is also – or especially – the case with chemical products. Today's production systems can only meet these demands with difficulty: A change in production volume generally confronts conventional systems with a loss in production efficiency.
Accordingly, new products are usually only launched for reliable markets, while new and promising technologies are only applied with considerable delay. Moreover, especially in the future environment set by Industry 4.0, it is expected that the trends of globalization and individualization will continue to peak – and with them, the demands on production process flexibility. This means it is even more important to toughen up production systems today, by making systems and machines flexibly adaptable.