Peter Hehenberger

The transition to sustainable energy sources presents significant challenges for energy distribution and consumption systems. Specifically, the intermittent availability of renewable energy sources and the decreasing usage of fossil fuels pose challenges to energy flexibility and efficiency. An approach to tackle these challenges is demand-side management, aiming to adapt energy consumption and demand. A key requirement for demand-side management is the traceability of the energy flow among individual energy consumers. In recent years, advancements in industrial information and communication technology have provided additional potential for data acquisition. Complementary to acquired data, a physics-based modeling and analysis approach is proposed, which describes the energy consumption with physical parameters. This results in comprehensive options for monitoring actual energy consumption and planning future energy demand supporting energy efficiency and demand-response goals. To validate the proposed approach, a case study with a 3D printer covering approximately 110 h of active printing time is conducted. The medium-term study results indicate a consistent parameter trend over time, suggesting its conceptual suitability for industrial application. The approach helps to monitor energy efficiency among manufacturing assets by identifying peak loads and consumption hotspots, and provides parameters to estimate energy consumption of manufacturing processes. Results indicate up to 50% energy savings when switching the printing material and indicate further potentials.

A critical issue that has dominated the field of Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs) and Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) is their usefulness to climate change, their second life, and their recyclability. With recent developments in the discipline of circular economy, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of LIBs becomes important. There are numerous studies on LCA of LIBs and this paper investigates the existing LCA results to quantify the different parameters that could affect the decisions of a battery pack design engineer. Global Warming Potential (GWP) and Abiotic Depletion Potential (ADP) are the two most discussed environmental impacts among the previously executed LCA studies. GWP gives information on the carbon footprint associated with the usage of LIB whereas the ADP is associated with the depletion of resources, both environmental factors important to consider for a sustainable design process. This study also takes into account the Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) component, which provides a designer with a sense of the amount of energy used over the course of a LIB’s lifetime. The authors of this work suggest a design process model for a LIB pack design based on these considerations, which aids a design engineer in making the right choices. Consequently, this helps the designer to achieve more utility of raw materials, making sparing use of resources and find potentials to reduce waste in different life stages of a LIB pack.

Optimizing and predicting the energy consumption of industrial manufacturing can increase its cost efficiency. The interaction of different aspects and components is necessary. An overarching framework is currently still missing, and establishing such is the central research approach in this paper.This paper provides an overview of the current demands on the manufacturing industry from the perspective of digitalization and sustainability. On the basisof the developed fundamentals and parameters, a superordinate framework is proposed that allows the modelling and simulation of energy-specific properties on several product and process levels. A detailed description of the individual methods concludes this work and demonstrates their application potential in anindustrial context. As a result, this integrated conceptual framework offers the possibility of optimizing the production system, in relation to different energy flexibility criteria.

Volatility in the availability of energy resources is a key challenge to master in the transition to sustainable energy sources. Especially with a rising share of renewable energy sources the situation is expected to intensify. To leverage the situation within an industrial context, energy-aware scheduling could be used. However, state-of-the-art simulation techniques use state-based energy determination, which is merely suitable for recurring manufacturing of products. In order to enable energy-aware scheduling within a changeable manufacturing environment, an alternative approach is researched. The approach aims to disaggregate the used manufacturing entities and identify the individual load patterns. Based on the individual load patterns , a simulation and optimization architecture was derived to conduct energy-aware scheduling in future applications. The used methods include the analysis of current methods for scheduling and energy consumption prediction and derivation of the component-based simulation approach based on the state-of-the-art. Depending on the inclusion of environmental dependencies two optimization architectures were created. A case study with a small-scale demonstrator was conducted to present and validate the approach. Within the scope of the small-scale demonstrator the approach could be validated. The main contribution of the publication is the provision of an approach for scheduling orders for merely non-recurring jobs.

International agreements target a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. A major contributor to these greenhouse gas emissions is the generation and consumption of energy. By a varying supply and demand of different energy sources including renewables a varying energy mix results. A difficulty poses the determination of CO2 equivalent emissions for volatile energy types, because different energy sources have type-specific emission amounts. Within the manufacturing environment, the challenge is to allocate the resulting energy flows, respectively emission flows through the existing hierarchical structure.

The importance of a centralized data storage system for life cycle assessment (LCA) will be addressed in this paper. Further, the decision-making process for a suitable data storage system is discussed. LCA requires a lot of relevant data such as resource/material data, production process data and logistics data, originating from many different sources, which must be integrated. Therefore, data collection for LCA is quite difficult. In practice, relevant data for LCA is often not available or is uncertain and has therefore to be estimated or generalized. This implies less accuracy of the calculated carbon footprint. State of the Art research shows that the LCA data collection process can benefit from data engineering approaches. Key of these approaches is a suitable and efficient data storage system like a data warehouse or a data lake. Depending on the LCA use case, a data storage system can also benefit from the combination with other technologies such as big data and cloud computing. As a result, in this paper a criteria catalog is developed and presented. It can be used to evaluate and decide which data storage systems and additional technologies are recommended to store and process data for more efficient and more precise carbon footprint calculation in life cycle assessment.

Nowadays, several manufacturing systems are evolving towards a greater collaboration between human and robots. The development of such systems requires integrated design tasks involving many disciplines and domains such as systems engineering, safety analyses and multiphysics. Furthermore, the increasing presence of multiple and structured requirements makes the use of models inevitable during the designing phases and also strongly helpful during other phases of the system life-cycle. Besides, for a better efficiency, there is an increasing demand to have a Digital Twin of the system to be used for different purposes such as design improvements by playing different scenarios, virtual commissioning and controlling maintenance activities. In this paper, we first summarize the research context, the reference methodologies, and the emerging needs for Digital Twin creation. Then, we apply a design approach including Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Model-Based Safety Assessment (MBSA) and multi-physics modeling for the design of a collaborative workplace for the assembly of Electro-Mechanical Actuators on an aircraft wing. An operational flow to integrate MBSE, MBSA and multi-physics modelling activities is provided. Then, after having identified some relevant scientific barriers, we provide a meta-model for system models integration within a digital twin framework.

Companies nowadays have to deal with faster changing industries. To gain competitiveness companies have to provide offerings that are adding value for the customer, which can be achieved through a product-service-system (PSS). Therefore, this study aims at developing an integrated approach to develop all components of a PSS while including agile approaches to ensure customer-centricity. After a thorough literature research on the topics of PSS and agile methods was carried out, a reference model was developed which integrates the specificities of these two areas forming an integrated framework for agile PSS design. The result of this research is a reference model which includes crucial steps which are specific for the development of PSS and includes customers in almost all steps. Moreover, the framework orchestrates the development of hardware, software and services specifically for PSS.

During the design process of mechatronic systems, several decisions are necessary for the optimisation of the final product. A decision support process is therefore needed to help in the choice of a satisfactory solution. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate the performance criteria of the three sustainability dimensions in the design process of mechatronic systems. The proposed approach considers all lifecycle phases to prevent the phenomenon of impact transfer. It also uses a decision support method to assist the process of selection and calculation of different indicators for each alternative and the comparative analysis of the different investigated alternatives. The used research methodology starts with a literature review with the definition of specific LCSA methods followed by a prescriptive study establishing the process model and an empirical study on uses cases. The proposed approach is applied in a case study analysing two concepts of milk frother.

The increased competitive pressure forces companies to cease distinguishing products and services, and to provide customers with highly individualised solutions. To meet this requirement, it has been proposed the concept of product–service system (PSS) that is not simply an extension of physical products by delivering non-physical services to customers, but a systematic combination of products and services. However, most current studies do not consider the multi-disciplinary integration relating to the PSS design process, during which the collaboration within the product and service design teams should be achieved. Otherwise, the large number of iterative design activities resulting from poor multi-disciplinary collaboration may lead to long development lead-times and high development cost.To achieve the multi-disciplinary integration during the PSS design process, the authors propose an integrated design method using an improved interface modelling approach that provides a structural form to represent the information transfer between product and service components. The proposed PSS design method enables the product and service design teams to decrease the iterative design activities and improve their collaboration so that a more integrated design process can be accomplished. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the design method is applied to a design case of an industrial PSS.

In Industry 4.0, the growing incorporation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) into manufacturing facilities composed of mechatronic products brings the need of reducing development cost while maintaining the quality and in parallel the need to adapt changes in the product development. It is then essential to identify the criticalities of mechatronic system development and to introduce an optimised product development approach. As a result, our research work focuses on combining traditional and agile approaches to improve mechatronic products development. To illustrate the advantages of such hybridisation, we propose a first hybrid approach along with the case study, consisting of some elements of the scrum method into the V-model which include the freedom to propagate necessary changes in product architecture during the development of its different modules. This new approach also focuses on the required guidelines to adopt and use for enhanced mechatronic products development and criteria for evaluation of the proposed method. Finally, in order to provide flexibility in product architecture and modules design, the hybrid development process is presented with illustrative case study.

The implementation of Product-Service Systems gained importance over the last years with rising competition and the need of a better fulfilment of the customers’ demands. However, whilst there are dozens of examples of products, which were transitioned to a Product-Service System, the transition from services is currently uncommon. This paper shows how an established service can be transitioned to a Product-Service System. Through the analysis of different possible solutions, the paper demonstrates how an effective conceptual design can be conducted and shows a possible way for the implementation with an existing service. The functional validation of the results shows that the approach can unleash new potentials for service providers under the right circumstances.

Digitization has gradually emerged in the industry, research institutions, and universities to change the traditional practice. The objective of the paper is to study the influence of digitization on mechatronics education programs. One mechatronics program in Austria and one in Taiwan were compared, and the similarities and differences between the two are presented. A case study about a ducted fan system was used to illustrate how to build a digital twin demonstrator for the system and find out its remaining useful life model. The results show that the digitization started to improve mechatronics education through system simulation in both Austria and Taiwan.

Increasing usage of mechatronics systems into different applications such as manufacturing system, home appliances with IoT , digital twin and many more, demands an efficient product development method for mechatronics products. As agile product development is known for its efficiency and flexibility in the software industry, research to implement the same approach in the mechatronics industry was more than a necessity. This research unveils the views on the mechatronics product development methods with the help of semi-structured interviews and survey. It explains the use of agile methods as per the need of the industry and in the context of mechatronics product development. Many important aspects have been surfaced such as important phases of mechatronics product development for use of agile method along with involvement of different stakeholders, its benefits, pain points while using agile method and a need of incorporating virtual prototyping into the process. With these results, conceptualization of a hybrid approach could proceed in the right direction.

Traditional design processes must adapt to new industrial challenges, to the rapid evolution of technologies and the resulting complexity of systems. Today’s industry, particularly in the field of mechatronics, must design and develop ever more innovative products while reducing time-to-market in order to maintain a competitive edge. As late changes during the realization and detailed design phases lead to a considerable increase in costs and design time, it is necessary to introduce more flexibility during the development process. The agile approach has already proven successful in the design of software system and offer many benefits, as it aims to limit the rigidity of the specifications, interfaces and organization, and to involve in a more flexible way the different actors, customers, specifiers and partners. In this context, we propose a MBSE approach to identify the set of requirements related both to the mechatronic product development and to the dynamic market, companies and current new trends, in order to define the SCRUM++ framework key concepts that aim to meet previous requirements, by supporting agile hybridization methods.

At its conception mechatronics was viewed purely in terms of the ability to integrate the technologies of mechanical and electrical engineering with computer science to transfer functionality, and hence complexity, from the mechanical domain to the software domain. However, as technologies, and in particular computing technologies, have evolved so the nature of mechatronics has changed from being purely associated with essentially stand-alone systems such as robots to providing the smart objects and systems which are the building blocks for Cyber-Physical Systems, and hence for Internet of Things and Cloud-based systems. With the possible advent of a 4th Industrial Revolution structured around these systems level concepts, mechatronics must again adapt its world view, if not its underlying technologies, to meet this new challenge.

The purpose of this work is to point out the importance of the production phase for the carbon footprint calculation of powertrain components and to improve the understanding of necessary data for this calculation. Evaluation of lifecycle assessment data from numerous studies showed, that there is often a shift from the emissions in the use phase to emissions in the production phase, when alternative powertrain concepts are used. Therefore, in this work our focus is on the carbon emissions in the production phase of powertrain components. Data of raw materials used, production processes and supply chains is necessary and the uncertainties associated also have to be considered. At present, there is only little sufficient support for design engineers regarding the collection of relevant data for the carbon footprint calculation of powertrain production. In this work a data structure, which supports the collection of relevant data, including possible data sources, is presented.

In industry 4.0, the growing incorporation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) into manufacturing facilities composed of mechatronic products brings forth the need of reducing development cost while maintaining the quality and in parallel the need to adapt changes along the lifecycle of the product development. Most of the traditional development methods fail to solve such new challenges. However, some agile methods, widely used in the software industry, could meet these requirements. It is then essential to identify the criticalities of agile methods regarding mechatronic system development specificities.

There has been a shift in emphasis within systems from hardware-oriented to more software-oriented topics integrated in an overlaying communication framework (e.g., cloud-based services). This chapter presents current research in the field of the interaction between mechatronic and cyber-physical systems. It presents solution basics design methods that are illustrated by some real-world applications. The discussed case studies (Smart Home, Bio-mechatronic Systems, Cyber-Physical Production System, Data-driven analysis) provide illustration of applications involving different functional distributions of activity between the 4 key elements of people, data, mechatronics and cyber-physical system.