Tailored Data Exchange Process to Support Production Engineering

Due to progressive globalization, technological advances, climate targets imposed by governments that must be achieved, combined with ever-increasing cost pressure for companies, manufacturing and supplier participants of the production sector are facing an enormous change. In order to counteract these requirements, both development and production processes must be tailored to the new challenges. In addition to the optimization measures, production companies must also consider technology aspects related to climate targets, as already mentioned. A trend that is gaining ground in the automotive industry, as well as in many other industries (e.g. aviation, aerospace, etc.), is the approach of weight reduction through the introduction of new lightweight materials and material combinations. With regard to the automotive sector, the reduction of the total weight as well as further approaches (e.g. new propulsion technologies) have a large potential to contribute to a reduction of exhaust emissions. These changes in the area of materials and the associated joining technology are driving the automotive industry to a significantly change of the data exchange processes between development environments (e.g. CAD – Computer-Aided Design, CAE – Computer-Aided Engineering) and production-related environments (CAM – Computer-Aided Manufacturing). This paper deals with the data exchange processes of production-relevant information within automotive development and provides an approach to close the gap in this area. Furthermore, the presented approach of a tailor-made optimized data exchange process for production engineering shows an enormous time and cost reduction, and thus an earlier market entry date of products.