Introduction to the Multi-Disciplinary Engineering for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things and Services opens new perspectives for goods and value-added services in various industrial sectors. Engineering of industrial products and of industrial production systems is a multi-disciplinary, model- and data-driven engineering process, which involves engineers coming from several engineering disciplines. These engineering disciplines exploit a variety of engineering tools and information processing systems. This book discusses challenges and solutions for the required information processing and management capabilities within the context of multi-disciplinary engineering of production systems. The authors consider methods, architectures, and technologies applicable in use cases according to the viewpoints of product engineering and production system engineering, and regarding the triangle of (1) the product to be produced by (2) a production process executed on (3) a production system resource. This chapter motivates the need for better approaches to multi-disciplinary engineering (MDE) for cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) and provides background information for non-experts to explain the interaction between production engineering, production systems engineering, and enabling contributions from informatics. Furthermore, the chapter introduces a set of research questions and provides an overview on the book structure, chapter contributions, and benefits to the target audiences.