Hybrid Production Structures as a Solution for Flexibility and Transformability for Longer Life Cycles of Production Systems

The dynamic environment of manufacturing companies not only directly impacts products and their design but also affects the configuration of production systems. Traditionally used production principles, such as the flow principle, which could previously be operated economically for (homogeneous) standard products, now no longer meet the requirements due to the increasing number of product variants and decreasing volumes. Other production principles, such as job shops or cell production, offer more flexibility to cover the diversity of product variants. However, considering the economic and logistical targets, those principles have longer throughput times and higher levels of work-in-process. This paper presents the idea of combining different production principles into hybrid structures to combine the advantages of flow production, such as high utilization and short lead times, with the flexibility of other principles. Hybrid production structures make the production system more flexible and transformable so that changes can be implemented more efficiently, and the life cycle costs of a production system can be reduced as a result. However, the configuration of a hybrid production structure requires the consideration of different influencing factors and the quantification of the economic and logistical targets. For this purpose, a research approach is presented in this paper.