Appropriate maintenance support of products throughout their lifecycle is required to realize a sustainable circular society. For this purpose, we are developing a part agent system to support the lifecycle of individual parts. A part agent is a network agent provided for each part that monitors the state of the part, manages the related information on the part, and advises its user on its maintenance. The part agent performs a short-term lifecycle simulation of the corresponding part to estimate its prospective states and to s-lect preferable maintenance actions. The product information on which the lifecycle simulation is performed requires not only the shape, assembly, and kinematic information but also the information on the product’s behavior, including deterioration and deviation. In this paper, a product model that represents such information for the lifecycle support of products is proposed. Example applications of the model for the part agent include the lifecycle simulation of a simple manipulator and the generation of the display information to support users disassembling a product.

In order to achieve the climate targets, set by governments worldwide and the United Nations, measures must be taken to reduce CO2 emissions. A large proportion of CO2 is emitted during the manufacturing process, so there is a high potential for savings here. Making production more flexible can therefore help to reduce the CO2 footprint of products. In production, the combination of the injection molding process with lifecycle-depending use of the additive manufacturing process laser sintering should improve ecological sustainability. To investigate the effectiveness of combining these manufacturing processes, two scenarios are compared and analyzed. Some of the product lifecycle management factors such as part design, total number of pieces and product lifetime remain constant. In the first scenario, injection molding is used as a manufacturing process throughout all product lifecycle phases from market introduction to end-of-life to supply the demand. In the second scenario, injection molding is substituted by laser sintering depending on the lifecycle phase. In later product life phases, laser sintering replaces injection molding in order to no longer have to maintain or reproduce and store parts. The comparison of the scenarios is performed using the measured net energy consumption in combination with literature values and assumptions for all further product lifecycle management phases. Finally, product lifecycle management factors are determined that allow decision support in the demand-tailored selection of the manufacturing process to improve ecological sustainability.

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 logistic 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.