Strategic production technology planning using a dynamic technology chain calendar

Producing companies need to apply production technology chains that best fulfill current and future requirements. They have to evaluate whether the technology chain currently being used is sufficient or if there exist another chain that is more suitable. Moreover, companies have to ascertain the right period in time to switch from one chain to another, which depends strongly on multiple cycles that occur temporally, e.g., the technology lifecycle. To handle these cycles, this paper presents a dynamic technology chain calendar that is integrated in a method for strategic production technology planning. Within early phases, technology planning relies on qualitative information in the form of expert knowledge. To model this knowledge mathematically, continuous-time recurrent fuzzy systems are used. The practical use of the method is illustrated in an exemplary application. © 2015, German Academic Society for Production Engineering (WGP).