Considerations on Present Production Science Theory and Didactics: The Evident Lack of a Rational Manufacturing Theory

Abstract

Today’s universities’ manufacturing courses on production system design and analysis of performance dynamics are heuristics than rational-based, far away from a physics or mathematics theorem constructed science. This is also due to increasing computational power, which allowed the proliferation of simulation-based modeling for complex manufacturing systems to analyze their behavior and optimize their performance. Indeed, manufacturing theory remained stuck to generic practice-based production concepts. The lack of a well-structured scientific production specific theory is increasingly problematic. Engineering students lacking the foundation of a solid theory will base manufacturing systems design rather on believing that the optimization software will solve the scheduling issue instead of comparing alternative modern design principles to conceive high performance manufacturing systems. This attitude is far away from a scientific rational approach to design demand characteristic and product appropriate manufacturing systems by knowing “the theory”. A scientifically formulated manufacturing theory should cover two aspects: Firstly, a proper Cartesian-based understanding and law-based modeling of manufacturing systems to describe rationally their behavior; and secondly, a library with a comprehensive set of elementary production systems’ design principles. The design principles define the functioning of the manufacturing system and the theory models the resulting dynamics of the manufacturing system. This paper exemplarily shows the increased didactic and professional benefit of such an appropriate, solid, theorem and law based manufacturing science. In addition, it also discusses the impact of presently applied manufacturing simulation in today’s context of emerging Industry 4.0 type cyber-physical production systems (CPPS).