APMS 2013 International Conference
Sustainable Production and Service Supply Chains
September 9 -12, 2013 – State College, PA, USA
Special Session
Intelligent production systems und planning solutions for sustainability
1. Description
Within the special session the actual challenges of industrial enterprises are addressed: a higher market
dynamic, shorter product life cycles, the demand for more individualized products forces industrial
enterprises to changes in their way of production and has also big impacts on the design of production
systems. First of all, new objectives and performance criteria need to be defined to mirror the
aforementioned demands in planning and evaluation systems. Such criteria are for instance agility,
flexibility, sustainability etc. Secondly, the nature of production systems needs to be changed to meet the
new criteria; there are characteristics like modularity, the ability for reconfiguration, re‐ usability etc.
that have to be in the focus of system planners and users. This in turn has impacts on how such systems
are planned and operated and how they are embedded in existing structures. Current approaches that
may help to meet the new requirements are cyber‐physical systems, modular planning solutions, the
Digital Factory, sophisticated modeling techniques etc.
The objective of the proposed special session is to present and discuss most recent solutions for
production systems, production system design and operation that meet actual requirements like
flexibility and agility, re‐usability and sustainability. The session addresses conference topics like
collaborative tools in production, computational intelligence in production, ICT for manufacturing as
well as sustainable factory planning and scheduling.
2. Topics:
The main focus of the special session is on the following topics:
adaptive production systems
sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques
digital methods for planning and ramp up
agile, adaptive and modular planning processes, methods and tools
intelligent process control
sustainable learning approaches
The special session is being built on an existing network of researchers in production system design
from Germany, Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Hungary, Finland and Norway but also invites other
contributors and participants.
3. Organizers of the Special Session
The special session will be organized by the Department of Factory Planning and Factory Management
at the Chemnitz University of Technology. The research focus of the department is mainly the
development of sophisticated and future oriented concepts for production and factory systems
addressing topics like flexible factories and networks, modeling and simulation, digital factory,
production control, innovation management.
The session will be organized and chaired by Prof. Dr.‐Ing. Egon Mueller ‐ Head of the Department of
Factory Planning and Factory Management. He has been a Full University Professor at Chemnitz
University of Technology since 2002. Before that he had positions as a Professor at the University of
Applied Sciences in Zwickau, as the Director of the Department of Machine Construction at the Institute
of Technology, Zwickau and as the Technical Director of the Institute of Technology, Zwickau. Prof
Mueller is a member of the HAB (Academic Society for Work and Industrial Organization), a Fellow of
AIM (European Academy on Industrial Management), of the GfSE (Society for Systems Engineering), of
SoCol net and of the VDI (Association of German Engineers) Technical Division “Factory Planning”. He
serves as a reviewer of scientific journals like Production Planning and Control and as member of the
scientific committees of numerous conferences.