Swedish manufacturing industry utilizes around 55% of existing production resources and world-class figures are argued to be 85%. Companies managing to reduce this gap will gain profitability, for example by increased throughput and reduced investments to meet higher market demands.
There is also an important connection between reduced waste in production resources and sustainability. One indicator is that the system losses in production flows “waste” approximately 30% of the total energy-consumption in discrete manufacturing. Most companies have problems with machine downtime and that other resources have to wait in idle or blocked states, so called system losses.
Complements the traditional view of maintenance
Chalmers’ research in Production Service Systems complements the traditional view of maintenance, which is to retain and restore manufacturing a functional unit, with improving activities. This means that Production Services include improving, preventive, as well as reactive activities to enable even higher performance than originally designed.
The purpose is to improve sustainability of production systems by reducing disturbances and their associated downtime and uncertainties. The work is performed in close cooperation with industry and will result in:
- Increased throughput, robustness, and predictability (economical sustainability)
- Reduced risks and increased personal safety (social sustainability)
- Reduced waste associated to disturbances and downtime, e.g. energy consumption (ecological sustainability).
The main objective is to reduce downtime (both the number of disturbances and the service/repair times) by improving the cooperation between production and maintenance organizations. Enablers for such cooperation are for example: shared methodologies and tools, joint production and maintenance planning, and shared data and information sources.
Research projects
Find all active research projects here
Production Service Systems, a Chalmers Area of Advance Project
Parts of the research on Production Service Systems are connected to an assistant professorship within Chalmers’ Areas of Advance. This project focus on production services from a systems perspective. Thus, the interaction between production resources and the solutions for joint production and maintenance planning are here more important than technical solutions/repairs on individual resources.
An example is to use dynamic updates of production system constraints, i.e. real-time bottleneck detection, in the planning of service activities. A recent case study in automotive industry showed for example that productivity can be increased by approximately 7% just by using priority-based planning of production services compared to the current first-come-first-served approach.
The work is currently proceeding with international partners, both industrial and academic, to enable and introduce continuous re-prioritization of service activities based on the dynamic behavior of system constraints.
Members of the group
Anders Skoogh, Leader of the research group. Focus on Production Service Systems & Maintenance.
Torbjörn Ylipää, Researcher/Teacher. Focus on research and teaches in the areas of maintenance, reliability and security